Chapter 10: Can Adult Students Transform Our Universities?

Pick up virtually any book or article about the American university, and what do you read? Here, for example, is a typical line from a recent book by the late Charles Muscatine (2009), a long-time thoughtful commentator on higher education: “Most universities and colleges [are] devoted ... to providing middle class youth with a four-year transition to adulthood, away from their parents, surrounded by their peers” (p. 4). In the same vein, a Chronicle of Higher Education reviewer of books about colleges (Benton, n.d.) sees his audience to be, not only faculty and administrators, but also “undergraduates and their parents [italics added].” Similarly, the New York Times occasional supplement, Education Life, reports exclusively on issues of interest primarily to parents and their adolescent children—for example, the heavy competition for college admissions among high school seniors (Bucior, 2012).