The Roots of Change: Adult Higher Education and Online For-Profit Institutions

Background

Growth in adult enrollments in higher education, defined as students 25 years of age or older, surged from 27.8% in 1970 to 38.3% in 1980, to 44.1% in 1990 and remained in the 40% range until 2020, when it was expected to decrease slightly to 38% (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2018 as cited in Robertson, 2020). Today, numbers and demographics for adult students have become relatively consistent; in general, today’s new majority (a term coined in 2016 by Allan Golston of The Aspen Institute) of adult students are part-time, middle-aged women (Robertson, 2020).

Those working in adult-focused programs during the past 50 years encountered a wide variety of adult students with consistent goals and motivations: employed adults eager to earn a degree in order to be eligible for a workplace promotion, rural women in Ohio Appalachia who would bring their children to class with them in the absence of affordable childcare, union workers whose skilled trades certifications were used toward an associate’s degree at a large community college, and a plethora of adult students, urban and rural, Florida’s Cuban immigrants and generational New Englanders, medical assistants and police chiefs, adults with disabilities and those recently released from incarceration, young adults preparing for careers using new technologies and others employed in career fields so new there wasn’t yet a name for them, they came—all seeking access to the promise of adult higher education.

In the later years of the 20^th century, any number of strategies were employed to serve adult students. Most of the strategies were designed by faculty and administrators employed by traditional private, not-for-profit colleges and universities and their public institution colleagues; few institutions employed the use of technology to deliver learning experiences. However, as with all educational movements, the rise of the remote, for-profit university is grounded in social context and relies upon and responds to the educational environment from which it emerges. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a glimpse into the development of adult higher education in the second half of the 20^th century and the ways in which adult-serving institutions laid the groundwork for the popular, adult higher education online institutions that are the focus of this collection. In this chapter the authors show the evolution of the corporate, for-profit university as having its roots in the ideas of distance education for adults. We propose that the idea of a corporate university was embedded in a long history of acceptance of proprietary education in the United States and emerged from the concepts underpinning the independent study movement, the correspondence school and the idea of home study, and the emergence of adult-focused degree programs.