Creating a Place for Adult Learners in Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities

Creating a Place for Adult Learners in Higher Education offers deep insights into how to attract, teach, support, and retain students over the age of 25 – an important yet often overlooked student group.

Comprehensive in scope, this book covers all the main aspects of adult students’ relationships with higher education institutions: recruitment, admissions, and financing; course and program provision and teaching approaches; and student support, retention, and completion. The discussion is bolstered by chapters of analysis on adult student demographics (including both diversities and commonalities), exploration of leadership challenges, and discussion of measurements of success. Drawing from the most up-to-date research as well as practical experience and descriptions of best practices by programs historically serving adults, the authors provide a broad set of strategies and recommendations to place adult students at the center of the educational process.

Higher education leaders, practitioners, and administrators will find this book an invaluable resource as they seek to better account for and support this key student group, which now comprises approximately 30% of the US undergraduate population.

Amy D. Rose is Emeritus Professor of adult education at Northern Illinois University. She has writes about issues related to adult education history and policy. She was a co-editor of the Handbook of Adult Continuing Education: 2010 Edition and a co-author of Professional Foundations of Adult and Continuing Education (2017), which won the Cyril Houle award from the American Association for Adult Education (AAACE). She served as a co-editor of the Adult Education Quarterly and is presently a co-editor of Adult Literacy Education: The International Journal of Literacy, Language, and Numeracy. In addition, she has served as a president of AAACE

Jovita M. Ross-Gordon is Distinguished Professor Emerita at Texas State University. She is the author/coauthor or editor/coeditor of several books including SuperVision and instructional leadership: A developmental approach (11th ed., in press, 2023) and Foundations of Adult and Continuing Education (2017). She has also published numerous chapters, articles, and proceedings on adult/higher education as well as on equity as related to race, gender, and (dis)ability. Her honors include Texas State University Graduate College Outstanding Mentor (2019); the Cyril O. Houle Award, Outstanding Literature in Adult Education, (2018); the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame (2015) and the Career Achievement Award of the Commission of Professors of Adult Education (2013).

Carol E. Kasworm is W. Dallas Herring Emerita Professor of Adult and Community College Education at North Carolina State University. She has engaged in leadership, administration, instructional, and program development efforts in faculty and academic administrative roles at North Carolina State University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Houston-Clear Lake, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, University of South Florida, University of Georgia, and Michigan State University. Her main research and writing interests have focused upon the adult undergraduate experience. Her scholarship has included a number of foundational texts, book chapters, journal articles and proceedings, as well as a number of honors.