Adult Students, Non-Traditional Students, Post-Traditional Students, and Other Redundancies

Breaking news:  There is an enormous population of underserved adult students.  They are older than high school graduates; they work, have families and have limited access to higher education opportunities. Higher education needs to take action!

Oh, wait, you already knew that?   Apparently so does everyone else except higher education. Higher education insiders (read: faculty, administration, researchers, and the education media) keep making this discovery almost daily.  Well, to be fair, they are making different discoveries.  One study reveals the plight of “adult students.”  Another provides a profile of “non-traditional” students.  Yet another gives us the details of “post-traditional” students (my favorite).  As a former insider, I am both embarrassed and insulted.

In a recent piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Christian Smith cites a variety of examples of BS in higher education.  Among the more prominent is “the ideologically infused jargon deployed…to stake out in-group self importance and insulate them from accountability….” The repetitive, redundant studies of adult students stand as a prime example of this transgression.  In the past few weeks we have been insulted by several studies trumpeting the need to serve today’s “different” students.  I won’t go into the specifics of who is smearing us with BS (e.g., Goldie Blumenstyk, Louis Soares, Jonathan Galgiardi—Google them).

The authors of these various studies seem to want us to believe that they are telling us something that we haven’t known for some 40 years, namely that the American student population is trending older.  And that this simple fact has a number of ramifications, for example that this population works full- or part-time, has family obligations and thus has limited accessibility to higher education opportunities.  None of this is news to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with birth rates, higher education participation statistics, or the rise of for-profit higher education.

But it is (fake) news to traditional higher education, which has ignored this population for decades.  And were it not for the fact that the 18-to-24-year-old population has shrunk markedly, higher ed would undoubtedly still be ignoring what has become the majority profile of students. Now, to feed the bulldog, institutions have belatedly and reluctantly come to the table.

That table would be the one set by John Sperling in the 1970’s.  His perspicacity resulted in the amazing success first of University of Phoenix, and eventually of some of those who replicated his method.  Traditional academics reviled Dr. Sperling and his success, even in the face of overwhelming numbers of students who graduated from his university.  That would be, of course, because higher ed believed that many if not most of those students didn’t deserve a postsecondary education.  They weren’t smart enough or affluent enough to fill the classrooms and coffers that catered to a relatively elite population.  Sperling, conversely, built a system designed for this disenfranchised group. His genius led to the democratization of higher education, offering hope and education to hundreds of thousands of learners.

The rest of higher education existed in a parallel universe in which students were largely homogenous, highly predictable in their behaviors, and sufficient in number of provide a healthy cash flow.  As this population has dwindled, institutions have had to forage for students.  This “new” pool seemed like a likely source of new students, but institutions that previously had to do minimal work in student support are finding difficulty in every aspect of serving this population, from recruiting to admissions to retention.  In typical fashion, rather than using the rich array of data that is available about this student, higher ed reinvents the wheel (multiple times).  The perpetuation of jargon masks ineffectiveness and allows for continued discussion and calls to action, rather than any actual action for the most part.

One of the studies referenced even goes so far as to say that adult learners are “the population that higher education—and the nation—can’t afford to ignore.”  To be crass—and accurate-- higher education needs the money in the face of a broken business model. Further, employers need qualified workers whom they expect higher education to prepare.  Moreover, students expect to be employable when they graduate.  This is a level of accountability that is both new and daunting. Higher education is struggling on all fronts.

As for the nation at large, research like that which I am disparaging (dare I say mocking?) somehow misses the fact that much of society figured all this out some time ago.  A lot of time and money is being spent currently by higher ed trying to figure out how to recruit these students that they don’t understand and how to build adequate support systems for them.  It is interesting to note that if you look at marketing campaigns in other sectors of society, you won’t find this problem.  Retail, the auto industry and banking, for instance, have adapted to the shifting demographics of America just fine.  They understand that by using readily available data they can tailor marketing campaigns and service systems to various intended audiences.  They just do it. They understand that if they don’t, someone else will.  Higher education hasn’t figured that piece out yet, as organizations like Pearson, Amazon, and Apple are poised to get the job done.