This is what today’s college students really look like
When most people think of a college student they likely imagine an 18- to 22-year-old coed bounding through the quad on the way to her dorm from a lecture hall. But these days, the typical college student actually looks more like Erin Jones.
Jones, 37, is a veteran and single mom who drives to her classes multiple days a week. After spending time in the military and the workforce, Jones decided to go back to school last year to study nursing as a way to ensure she’d one day earn a paycheck large enough to comfortably support herself and her two children.
Throughout her college journey, Jones, who attends Mount Wachusett Community College, has hustled to get access to subsidized child care and housing, but it hasn’t always been easy. The few months where she paid to send her son to private day care while he awaited a subsidized spot were so financially taxing, they almost pushed her to bankruptcy, Jones said.
Despite the time and money struggles and the awkwardness of sometimes being the oldest student in the class, returning to college has, thus far, been worth it, she said.
“It has been really eye opening for me to remind myself that I am smart, I am capable, but I do have to put the effort in to buckle down to do it,” she said. “I was also really surprised at how many support options there are and how easy some of them are to get and how hard some of them are to get.”
Though they often don’t make it into American Pie-style movies or glossy brochures, students like Jones have been walking around college campuses in droves for decades. About 38% of undergraduate students are older than 25, about 58% are working, and more than one-quarter are parenting, according to data from the Lumina Foundation, a nonprofit working to increase the share of Americans with post-high school credentials. Many fit all three categories. The bulk of college students also attend community college or less-selective regional public schools — not necessarily the Ivory towers we typically envision.
“We have this romantic notion that all college students came straight from high school graduation,” said Kim Cook, the executive director of the National College Access Network, an organization focused on boosting college access. “That’s the experience that some people had, or was more of the norm of the experience decades ago, but it is no longer the case.”
Terrence HoranThe reasons for the change? A decadeslong economic shift, said Anthony Carnevale, the director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, which marks the beginning of the changes in the early 1980s, when post-high school education started to become a necessary qualification for a majority of jobs.
“That’s what did it,” he said. Students of all types began attending college to get the skills necessary to compete in the new economy, pushing a change in the demographics of college campuses.
Despite this change in the makeup of college campuses, higher education institutions have been slow to adapt to the needs of the new “typical” college student. This is partly the result of a desire among schools to emulate the most vaunted models of higher education — elite four-year residential colleges — because those institutions can draw well-resourced students and families who can keep a school afloat, Carnevale said.
“In many ways the demography of college no longer fits the institution,” he said.
Balancing kids, work and school
Since many colleges still cater to residential students between the ages of 18 and 22, it can be challenging for students of different ages or with different circumstances to navigate campus and academic life.
For one, balancing full-time work and school can be a major struggle, given the way colleges typically schedule classes during weekday mornings and afternoons. That lack of flexibility in part explains the rise of for-profit colleges over the past several years, Carnevale said. Though critics have derided the education they deliver to students as subpar, for-profit colleges use night and online classes to truly cater to students who are doing more than just going to school.
Balancing work, school and her family responsibilities has been one of the biggest challenges of going to college for Estephany Rodriguez, who decided to pursue higher education after time in the military, as a way to earn a sustainable living. “I was working dead end jobs and decided that the best option for me was to go to school,” the 27-year-old said.
She typically begins her days at 6 a.m. to prep her kids for school and doesn’t go to bed until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. after she’s done with homework. In between, Rodriguez attends class, works full time as a line cook at a resort and helps her kids with their homework. Despite the punishing schedule, Rodriguez has already earned her associate’s degree and she’s working toward her bachelor’s in nursing.
And even as the number of students with children has grown, it’s — by and large — harder for student parents to access child care. The number of campus child-care centers dropped from 1,314 to 1,128, a drop of 14.2%, between 2004 and 2012, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Having a safe place for your child to stay while you’re in school historically hasn’t been thought of as integral to the college experience, said Barbara Gault, the vice president of IWPR, which is in part why child care centers have started to disappear. “Child care centers on campuses are almost considered an add-on,” she said.
What’s more, parents looking to find affordable child care off campus may soon struggle even more. The Trump administration’s budget plan proposes to slash funding to Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS), a program that provides on-campus child care to low-income student parents.
College affordability poses challenge to nontraditional students
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing so-called nontraditional students is one that plagues most college students, but affects this group more acutely: the rising cost of college. State disinvestment in higher education has pushed up tuition prices at public schools, where most of these students study.
And for many of these students, navigating the financial aid system can be daunting without the help of guidance counselors and other resources often available to students just graduating from high school, said Hadass Sheffer, president of the Graduate! Network, an organization that works to increase the number of adults attending college.
“A lot of adults don’t even think of applying for federal assistance,” she said. “If they think of assistance they think of either a family member helping them or they go to some kind of commercial lender.”
Even when these students apply for federal financial aid, there are subtle ways in which the system puts them at a disadvantage. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, form that colleges use to determine a student’s eligibility for financial aid doesn’t account for expenses like the lost wages that come from quitting a job or scaling back hours in order to attend college.
Gault suggests colleges reach out to working or adult students and encourage them to provide a more detailed picture of their finances than what’s required on the FAFSA so that officials can get a true sense of how much assistance they’ll need to attend college. Adult students should also try to be proactive about sharing their full financial lives with their colleges.
What’s more, these students are often trying to enroll in college with an already challenging track record with college financing. About 14% of students who apply to be part of KC Degrees, a program that helps adults in the Kansas City area attend college, have already defaulted on student loans, said Sheri Gonzales Warren, the community, economic and workforce development program director of the Mid-America Regional Council, which oversees the program. About 11% of student loans overall are delinquent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Other students come into the program with a hold on their transcript because they weren’t able to pay a bill to their former school. As part of the program, Warren said her staff will negotiate with colleges about payment plans or other arrangements to make it possible for these students to return to school.
Older students are increasingly attractive to colleges
Despite these challenges, Warren says that colleges and businesses in her region are beginning to see this group as a demographic worth catering to. Some schools are agreeing to waive application fees or are offering scholarships specifically geared to returning, adult students, she said. With declining state investment and drops in both domestic and international enrollment, the schools see adult students “as an opportunity.”
Other regions have the same outlook. In Tennessee, the governor’s challenge to get 55% of the state’s residents equipped with a college degree or certificate by 2025, known as Drive to 55, has pushed policy makers to think more critically about how best to serve adult and working students interested in attending college.
“We knew we could not meet the Drive to 55 by focusing on traditional students,” said Jessica Gibson, the assistant executive director for adult learner initiatives at Tennessee’s Higher Education Commission.
In 2016, the state launched the Tennessee Reconnect Communities, an initiative of dedicated community-based, institution-neutral, advisers to help adults navigate the process of applying to college and line up their financial and personal lives so they’re in a position to succeed once there. The advisers also work with prospective students to ensure they’re choosing an educational program that will set them on a path toward success.
“We want to make sure that they are getting a degree for something that results in increased job opportunities for them,” she said.
The schools themselves are also working to adjust to this group of students by, for example offering classes in blocks that fit better with a work schedule or keeping their financial aid offices open into the evenings or on weekends, Gibson said.
Though this kind of progress is heartening, more needs to be done at the structural level to ensure adult and working students can succeed, no matter where they go to school, said George Pruitt, the president of Thomas Edison State University, a New Jersey public college that caters exclusively to adults. Pruitt, who has been working in the space for decades, said the federal government still hasn’t adjusted to the needs of so-called nontraditional students.
For example, the government’s data system to track college students doesn’t account for transfer students, treating them as dropouts, he says; it only focusing on whether a student leaves a school, regardless of the reason. Without accurate data on the demographic of students, it’s difficult for institutions to serve them effectively, even when they want to, he said.
“Part of our challenge is trying to recalibrate the public debate because there is a new reality — it’s not even a new reality, it’s been around for 40 years — but we act like this just happened,” he said. Working, adult students who are often parents “are the norm in American higher education today. At some point they’ve got to stop being treated as a minority group.”
Some, like Rodriguez, never gave up, despite the many challenges. “There was a point throughout my few years where I thought I should just stop,” she said of her time spent pursuing an associate’s degree. “But I kept going and I finished.”