Full Description
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.
Contents
Preface
1. Introduction
2. Understanding Adult Learners
3. Rethinking Admissions and Recruitment for the Adult Student
4. The Challenges of Financial Support for Adult Students
5. Institutions and Programs designed with adult students in Mind: Past and Present
6. Teaching Adult Learners in Higher Education
7. Academic Advising and Support Services and Adult Learners
8. Non-academic Supports for Adults
9. Student Success: Issues related to Persistence and Completion
10. Adult Undergraduate Collegiate Outcomes
11. The Leadership Challenge: Serving Adults in a Collegiate World
12. Conclusions, Trends, and future Directions
