User blog comment:Thailog/Ep. 204 "Salvage" discussion/@comment-4948848-20120520025057/@comment-1839689-20120520031116

Here's my educated guess. If we assume that they put heroing aside to focus on college and that they started college the fall after they graduated high school, then they would have been "retired" for about two and a half years at the start of season two.

Of course, none of that is confirmed. If they took a gap year before starting college, or tried to do both heroing and college at the same time for awhile before deciding against it, their tenure as full-time civilians will have been shorter. If they chose to go full-time civilian for another reason, then we have no way to guess.