Abstract
Students who are over 24 years – older than the age deemed “traditional” for higher education – account for about one in every three students enrolled in community colleges. Unfortunately, their educational outcomes lag behind their younger peers. A greater understanding of what it means to be an adult student in higher education is a crucial step toward determining how postsecondary institutions, particularly community colleges, can improve adults’ experiences and chances of achieving their goals. With the overriding objective of providing guidance to stakeholders about how to strengthen adult students’ success and increase college completion, we draw from extant literature to develop a Multidimensional Conceptualization of Adult Students (MCAS). We propose a corresponding set of measures to identify adult students in a community college’s student population and to differentiate the gradations of experience, responsibility, and subject sense of adulthood that constitute adult status. We review evidence on adult students’ participation in higher education, how their approaches to college tend to differ from younger students, and community college programs and initiatives that aim to improve adult students’ outcomes. Finally, we discuss the alignment of the programs and initiatives with adult students’ learning needs and with the dimensions of the MCAS.
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Notes
- 1.
Metzner and Bean (1987), Sandler (2000), and Sorey and Duggan (2008) use the term “social integration” to refer to social experiences, based on Tinto’s (1975) work. However, given the assimilationist assumptions and origins of the term (Museus 2014) and the differences in how these authors measured the variable, we describe the social variables with terminology that better represents how the variables were measured.
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Acknowledgments
Work on this paper was supported in part by the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education, through Grant R305A160156 to Miami University and the University of Michigan. The opinions expressed are those of the researchers and do not represent views of the Institute or the US Department of Education. The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Leigh Arsenault, Mollie Bush, Alfredo Sosa, Kathryn McGrew, and Annabelle Arbogast. The authors also thank James Benson of the Institute of Education Sciences for valuable feedback and support.
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Bahr, P.R., Boeck, C.A., Cummins, P.A. (2021). Strengthening Outcomes of Adult Students in Community Colleges. In: Perna, L.W. (eds) Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research. Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44007-7_3
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