Realizing the Potential of Adult Learners

Thomas Jefferson’s rationale for making public education his most important priority was straightforward. The advantage of a democracy over earlier forms of government was that it could tap the skills of the entire populace, not just those of a privileged group. The more people who receive an education, the better prepared they are to participate in democratic government. In his own way, assistant professor Brian Pusser is following Jefferson’s example. Along with colleagues in the Curry School of Education, he is identifying the barriers that prevent adult and nontraditional learners from pursuing a bachelor’s degree, and he is mobilizing educators and policymakers to remove those barriers.

Fully two-thirds of all post-secondary students are nontraditional learners. The efforts of Pusser and his colleagues have the potential to make a dramatic difference for individual nontraditional students. With the decline of the industrial sector in the United States and the disappearance of high-paying union jobs, a baccalaureate degree stands alone as one of the few dependable routes to a middle class life. According to Pusser, the accelerating shift to a knowledge-based economy means that we will soon face a shortage of baccalaureate holders in the workplace. As a nation, we ignore the challenge to build a more highly skilled workforce at our peril. For-profit, degree-granting institutions like the University of Phoenix are generally regarded as effectively meeting the basic needs of many adult learners seeking a baccalaureate degree.

With a grant from the Sloan Foundation, Pusser and his colleagues Curry School dean David Breneman and associate professor Sarah Turner examined the sources of their success. They found that the for-profits prospered by rigorously controlling the number of majors they offer, by standardizing courses, and by offering a narrow but well-defined path to a degree. Nontraditional students, who often have to balance the complex demands of work and family with their educational aspirations, find the simplicity and transparency of these institutions attractive and are willing to pay a premium to matriculate.

These findings highlight the challenges facing nonprofit universities. Nonprofits are often more inventive than their counterparts in the for-profit sector in developing a varied set of baccalaureate programs for adult learners, and they can often make substantial sums of financial aid available. Yet they will need to do considerably more to attract adult learners in an increasingly competitive postsecondary environment.

With grant support from the Lumina Foundation for Education, Pusser and his colleagues have identified a number of steps that nonprofit educators could take to enable their institutions to serve adults more effectively. These include increasing night, weekend, and online course offerings, making childcare more readily available, and being more pro-active in providing the kind of guidance and services that nontraditional learners need if they are to complete their programs successfully. Their research suggests that the ability to earn credits at community colleges that can be transferred to four-year institutions is a key factor in helping adult and nontraditional learners eventually obtain the baccalaureate. They have also highlighted initiatives that national and state policymakers might pursue to encourage adult learners to complete baccalaureate programs. “As we move into the policy arena, our task is to change the conversation from boosting employment with short-term retraining programs to providing sustained long-term economic development through baccalaureate programs,” Pusser says. “Baccalaureate attainment for adults builds more robust families and communities.”