Education articles

An introduction to adult education - and the role of the private sector in it

The concept of postsecondary education aimed specifically at adults has a long and at times controversial history.

In the nineteenth-century, institutions began to offer programs that would form the foundations of contemporary night school and distance education offerings. These programs led to the concept of the "external degree", whereby a student could prepare at teaching colleges or privately for a degree which was then earned by sitting formal examinations audited by the degree-awarding university.

The external degree concept offered opportunities for the working adult, who had perhaps missed out on a chance to attend university after leaving school, to obtain a qualification that would otherwise have entailed an impossible compromise between campus attendance, career and family responsibilities. This was the beginning of a revolution that would go on to embrace non-traditional education and much else besides.

During the 1990s, the number of external degree programs on offer from private providers increased sharply with the advent of the Internet, and those programs began to concentrate on distance learning and correspondence instruction as their modes of delivery. This has resulted in a wide choice for consumers and a spectrum of offerings in terms of their program type, cost, delivery methods and quality.

In this paper we will give an overview of some universal considerations of adult postsecondary education, and then examine the role of the self-regulating private sector in fulfilling them.

Adults seeking education
Some of the many types of adults seeking postsecondary education include the following:

? Working adults seeking an award to consolidate experience and education gained through informal sources, or through formal sources that has not led to an award;
? Working adults seeking to update their skills and move up to the next educational level, often through a graduate level degree or diploma;
? Working adults seeking to change career;
? Adults who are taking a career break or who are unemployed and seek to improve their prospects in the workplace;
? Adults who do not work but want to study in furtherance of their interests, hobbies and enthusiasms;
? The retired and those who want to "finish what they started";
? Those who seek a title that has personal and professional significance to them and offers a competitive advantage in the marketplace, such as a professional doctorate.

Adults seeking educational opportunity do not fit into as easy categorization as do school-leavers. The main reason for this is that, except for those who are seeking to change careers, many will be already experienced in their fields and seeking to study either to consolidate this experience ("to validate what I know") or to move ahead to the next level, often via a graduate-level program. This means that although adults will often have very clear aims as to what they want to achieve and how to achieve it, those aims will be precisely focussed and will differ a good deal from one person to the next.

Offering educational programs to this constituency is therefore not a simple matter. Motivated adults show a wish to customize their program to include exactly what they want and need and no more, and an understandable wish to reach their goal through the most economical and efficient route. Although a school-leaver is often happy to see their college experience in terms of four years of varied and sometimes digressive academic life, the adult learner rarely has the patience or willingness to sit through classes repeating what they already know. They demand an individualized educational experience that is tailored to them and them alone.

The challenge of educating adults
Many institutions seeking to serve adults are faced with difficulties in meeting these needs. Where an institution is large and has a substantial bureaucracy, it cannot easily individualize the educational experience, and instead must serve the needs of the majority over those of the individual. Furthermore, accreditation agencies and government overseers of education do not generally take kindly to program individualization, regarding it as impossible to assess and therefore as inherently difficult to subject to consistency measures and standardization - the core aims of such bodies. Perfect programs for such institutions are those that follow a set pattern and where everyone does the same thing at the same time or chooses from a limited range of options. These programs are also the most readily commodified as a set "product".

One reason why private providers have

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