In 1983, administrators at Chicago`s Loyola University posted notices on a few bulletin boards inviting adult students to gather and discuss the problems they face in re-entering college. Then they waited to see if anybody would show up.
”We had a room full of people,” recalled Sandra Cook, associate dean of Mundelein College of Loyola, the university`s part-time division. ”Loyola has always had a lot of adult students. Now, (the return of adults) is being felt nationally in higher education the last 10 to 15 years.”
From that meeting evolved the Re-Entry Adult Program, known as REAP. It continues to serve hundreds of adult students each year who are taking the plunge back into college after years, or even decades, of being away.
The concerns expressed at the first meeting included test-taking, lecture note-taking, general study skills, and addressing a feeling of, ”am I the only person doing this?” Cook said. The original concept was to have REAP serve the students throughout their campus stay, but ”it turned out that once they got over their initial concerns, they didn`t need the support network,” she added. ”They got their confidence back.”
Today, REAP offers free workshops to all adult Loyola students on topics including writing research papers, time management and career assessment. There is a get-together each semester where adults can network and share experiences on making the transition back to college.
Recent census figures show that 25 percent of college students are older than 30, said Drew Allbritten, executive director of the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education, based in Arlington, Va. With the declining number of 18-year-olds, universities are turning to older students to fill the gap, officials said.
Once the schools get those older students, they often develop programs to assist them. Many are geared toward undergraduates, who seem to seek help more frequently than graduate students, administrators said; still, there are several graduate school programs that address re-entry student concerns.
At Aurora University`s School of Social Work, the average age of those enrolled in the master`s program is 37. The first semester begins with a mandatory three-day retreat, where the new class members are introduced to the university, the social work program and each other.
”They can begin to build a support network of other students,” said Sara Bonkowski, a social work professor. ”There are a lot of worries at first about being out of school for so long, and how they`ll do now that they are back.”
Alan Bell, 46, of Glen Ellyn remembers those fears. Bell said he was ”a rotten student” the first time he went to college after high school. He never got a degree, and instead found a career as a purchasing agent in a packaging and container business.
In the mid-1980s, though, Bell decided he wanted to do something else.
”I`d had my fill of it,” he said of the business world. ”I wasn`t really enjoying what I was doing.” He returned to undergraduate school part time and received a bachelor`s degree in behavioral science.
Then last year, he quit his job and enrolled full time in the two-year social work master`s program at Aurora.
”I was very nervous about going back to school,” Bell said, ”but I`ve really enjoyed it. And it hasn`t been that difficult, which was a little surprising since I was such a bad student the first time.”
Bell described the retreat as being very helpful in making the adjustments to being an adult student. ”It`s comforting for people of our age group to see a lot of their cohorts there. People have an opportunity to verbalize the concerns they have and to network so that they don`t feel they`re out there alone.”
Bell, who is married and has no children, didn`t have to make many of the family adjustments required of re-entry adults. His biggest adjustment, he said, is existing on his wife`s salary until he rejoins the work force.
For many other re-entry adults, a lot of juggling goes on with family, school and work.
”Almost every adult student will say he`s had some conflicts with family” over the return to school, said Michael Sawdey, dean of New College, the continuing education division at Aurora. ”The biggest issue they face is time management. Most adult students have the necessary intellectual resources to do well. They just need the time.”
At the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, students who are considering applying to the Executive MBA program can attend an open house at which they observe a class. Rowland Burnstan, an international business professor and vice president of admissions, calls the class sit-in an ”ah-ha!” experience. The adults wonder if they can cut it. After listening for a while, they think, ”Ah-ha! I can do that.”
Lake Forest also holds an orientation for new MBA students at which alumni talk about the time required by the program and the ways to fit schoolwork into already full schedules. There seems to be a consensus among professors there that adult re-entry students are a pleasure to teach and generally do better than their younger counterparts.
”They`re extraordinarily driven,” Burnstan said. ”You don`t have to work them into a frenzy-they`re already tigers.”
These students ”aren`t going back necessarily because they want to, but in many cases because they have to,” said Allbritten of the adult and continuing education association. ”With technology taking off, people have to go back and get retrained. . . . They`re taking things they need to stay competitive.”
Jacquie Harper, director of women`s services and the re-entry program at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, said that re-entry adults are much more focused and motivated than younger students because ”they really want to get that degree” and aren`t in school just because they don`t know what else to do after high school.
The re-entry adult program at Northeastern is called New Directions and is seven years old. It offers an orientation workshop before the semester begins in which students are introduced to the campus and the available degree programs. They also do an exercise in which they list their responsibilities
(jobs, children, etc.) and then discuss how they can fit school into the picture.
”For the age group with children still at home, school can be a very big pressure,” Harper said. ”Things have to change in the other areas. Maybe mom doesn`t come home and have dinner on the table every night at 6, or dad doesn`t come home and watch TV with the kids.
”Expectations have to change, and things need to be renegotiated. And some family members may not be supportive. I`d say generally the resistance comes not from the kids but from a spouse. Sometimes if the other person doesn`t also have a degree, it can be threatening for the spouse to go back to school.”
The program also offers periodic workshops on topics including study skills and using the library. The latter introduces adult students who used card catalogs the first time around in college to the modern computerized libraries of the 1990s.
Susan Feinberg, director of the graduate level Program in Technical and Professional Communications at Illinois Institute of Technology, said spouses are more likely to be supportive of a return to school these days than 10 years ago because of the economy and tight job market.
”Since you have to put bread on the table, it`s not as difficult as it once was to say (to a spouse) that you want to make a professional move,” she said.
The IIT program, which began in 1984, trains re-entry adults who are looking for a new career as technical writers. The program, which takes about two years for part-time students, includes a class that covers subjects such as study skills, time management and an introduction to computer technology.
