Learning in Adulthood. Sharan B. Merriam
federal level, for example, funding for literacy and job-training programs is a function of who is now participating, in conjunction with the perceived needs of nonparticipants. Along with current numbers and rates of participation of various segments of the adult population, other sociopolitical and economic factors play important parts in federal policy formation, not the least of which is the desire to maintain a stable, democratic society and a globally competitive workforce. For those who plan learning activities and instruct adults, it is certainly helpful to know as much as possible about the clientele being served.
This chapter first offers a descriptive profile of who participates in adult learning activities and the reasons why adults engage in learning. The second half of the chapter problematizes the concept of participation, asking who really has access to learning and who benefits from participating.
Who Participates?
Almost all studies of participants in adult education focus on formal, institutionally based programs. This, of course, is due to the ease of gathering this information from learners and institutions that sponsor programs. It is much more difficult to assess participation in nonformal, community-based activities or in informal self-directed learning. We first review participation of adults in formal adult education—that is, institutionally sponsored courses or classes. What little we do know about who participates in nonformal and informal learning will be reviewed at the end of this section.
Johnstone and Rivera's Landmark Study
In 1962, an “inquiry into the nature of adult education in America” was funded by the Carnegie Corporation and carried out by researchers Johnstone and Rivera (1965) at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in Chicago. The study sought to describe participation in formal and informal educational activities, assess attitudes and opinions held by adults concerning education, describe the organizations delivering adult education in a typical urban community, and focus on the educational and work experiences of young adults ages 17–24. The findings of this first national study have provided a baseline against which the findings of subsequent studies have been compared.
Because comparisons are made, it is important to know how adult education and adult are defined in this study. Realizing the significance of this function, Johnstone and Rivera (1965, p. 26) struggled to come up with a definition of an adult educational activity that was broad enough to capture systematic efforts at learning but not so broad as to include “a host of activities… which would fall beyond the range of any reasonable or workable definition of adult education.” They decided that an adult education activity would have as its main purpose the desire to acquire some type of knowledge, information, or skill and that it would include some form of instruction (including self-instruction). They thus measured involvement as a full-time adult student, as a part-time participant in adult education activities, and as a participant in independent self-education. An adult was defined as anyone either age 21 or over, married, or the head of a household. Interviews with a random national sample of nearly 12,000 households formed the data set.
Using the preceding definitions, Johnstone and Rivera (1965) estimated that 22% of American adults participated in “one or more forms of learning” between June 1961 and June 1962 (p. 1). They also discovered that what adults were learning was largely practical and skill oriented rather than academic: “Subject matter directly useful in the performance of everyday tasks and obligations accounted for the most significant block of the total activities recorded. Together, the vocational and home and family life categories alone represented 44 percent of all formal courses studied and 47 percent of the subjects people studied on their own” (p. 3).
This groundbreaking study also identified the major demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of participants. Age and formal schooling were found to be the primary indicators of participation in adult education. Johnstone and Rivera's often-quoted profile of the typical adult learner has held up, with minor deviations, in all subsequent national studies of participation. Their profile is as follows: “The adult education participant is just as often a woman as a man, is typically under forty, has completed high school or more, enjoys an above-average income, works full-time and most often in a white-collar occupation, is married and has children, lives in an urbanized area but more likely in a suburb than large city, and is found in all parts of the country” (p. 8).
One of the strengths of Johnstone and Rivera's study is that they included “independent self-education” along with participation in formal courses and community-based activities. Unfortunately, as reviewed in the next section, the first nine national studies of participation were limited to organized instruction offered by educational institutions, business or industry, and community organizations.
National Studies of Formal Participation
Beginning in 1969, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the U.S. Department of Education undertook a set of triennial surveys of participation of adults in education. The results of the first six surveys (1969, 1972, 1975, 1978, 1981, and 1984) and three studies in 1991, 1995, and 1999 have been loosely compared with each other to reveal participation trends. In these surveys, adult education was equated with organized instruction: “Adult education is defined as any course or educational activity taken part-time and reported as adult education by respondents” (U.S. Department of Education, 1986). These courses or activities are considered “formal” because they are sponsored by educational institutions or employers. Changes in methodology and sample design over the years warrant caution in making comparisons (Collins, Brick, & Kim, 1997). Nevertheless, certain trends emerged including an increase in the number of adults participating part time in organized instruction from a low of 10% in the 1969 survey to 14% in 1984, 38% in 1991, 40% in 1995, and 46% in 1999 (Kim & Creighton, 2000). In a comparison of the 1991 and 1999 NCES studies, Creighton and Hudson (2002) noted an overall increase in participation “among virtually every group of adults” surveyed (p. ix).
Two other NCES surveys of adult education participation were conducted in 2001 and 2005. As in previous studies, NCES employed a random, national digit dial (RDD) telephone survey of civilian, noninstitutionalized persons ages 16 and older not enrolled in secondary school at the time of the interview. In this survey, “formal” coursework or training was defined as those activities having an instructor. As can be seen in Table 4.1, the overall rate of participation in formal educational activities was 44%. As in previous participation studies, younger adults with higher levels of education and household income and in professional and managerial occupations had higher rates of participation. Women had slightly higher rates of participation than men (47% versus 41%). Not surprisingly, “work-related courses” were the most cited reason for participation in formal adult education activities, with “personal-interest courses” as the second most cited type of activity. An interesting finding in this 2005 survey was that one-third of the participants in formal adult education activities reported using some type of distance education (O'Donnell, 2006). One would expect with the growth of Internet-related educational opportunities since this survey that this would be even higher today.
Table 4.1 Percentage of Adults Who Participated in Adult Education, by Type of Educational Activity and Selected Adult Characteristics: 2004–2005
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Adult Education Survey of the 2005 National Household Education Surveys Program.
| Formal adult education activities | |||||||||
| Characteristic | Number of adults (thousands) | Any formal adult education | ESL classes | Basic skills/GED classes | Part-time college degree program | ||||