The New Professional Working Adult Learner – The Next Generational Cohort

With greatest respect and reference to Bob Dylan’s 1964 song “...the times [students] they are a changin...”, there has been a transitioning of professional working adult learners from one generational cohort to another, and now, to yet the youngest of generational cohorts... the Millennials. Correlations exist between the number of webpage “hits” and the subsequent fall enrollments. While this information is important, it reflects a lagging indicator; that is, it does not tell us why there may have been more or less webpage hits. In contrast, a leading indicator will provide information as to why something has come to be. From this perspective, this paper will examine the leading indicators to the new professional working adult learner; these individuals being the target cohort for fee-based professional education providers offering Master of Science or Master of Arts degrees. Drawing from sixteen years of student data, this report will focus on who these cohort learners are and how they compare to previous cohort groups of comparable age. The information presented will focus on generational cohort differences that impact, or have the potential to impact the offering of Master of Science degrees and other fee-based continuing educational opportunities. Specifically, this paper will focus on: Who are the new students The implications of ever increasing college costs The impact of increasing debt loads Moving back home after graduation and its implications – Postponing marriage – Postponing the buying of homes, cars and other material possessions Educational and income implications of having children later in life How do we make program/cost changes to our offerings to remain competitive Who Are the Students? To better understand how best and who is best to teach today’s college student, the personality and essence of the student needs to be better understood. P ge 26559.2 In a recent book by Levin and Dean titled Generation on a Tightrope1, the authors present a snapshot of undergraduate students enrolled between 2009 and 2014. The authors begin by laying the foundation: Today’s college students are struggling to maintain their balance as they attempt to cross the gulf between their dreams and the diminished realities of the world in which they live. They are seeking security but live in an age of profound and unceasing change. (p. ix)... They desperately want the economic opportunity their parents enjoyed but are coming of age during a deep recession with reduced career prospects. They want to believe in the America Dream and are optimistic about their personal futures but they are pessimistic about the future of the country. They want to be autonomous grown-ups but seem more dependent on their parents and the adults around them than any modern generation. They want intimacy—a partner and a family—but they are isolated, weak in face-to-face communication skills and live in a hook-up culture. They want to play by the rules but they don’t know the rules and the rules are in flux because of the dramatic changes in our economy, the rise of new technologies, the condition of our public and private institutions, and a world growing flatter. They want to live in an n Internet world, a digitally connected globe but the adults and social institutions around them are analog or digital immigrants, including their blackboard universities. From the onset, although not much of an issue, an understanding of their many names help, such that all may uniformly address these individuals as a cohort; that being born in a similar time period and having experienced similar major milestone events in their lives. Levin and Dean summarize the historical and current names being applied. Current undergraduates have been called millennials (Howe & Strauss, 1992) and generation 2K (Zoba, 1999) because they are a part of the first college generation of the twenty-first century. They have also been called generation Y (Tulgan, 2009) and generation iY (Elmore & Cathy, 2010), which is logical because they followed generation X and are partial to the Internet. There is generation Z (Hopkins, 2005) because they are the children of generation X. Building on that Internet theme are the meat and potatoes Internet generation (Milner, 2010), the too-easy-to-confuse-with-basketball net generation (Tapscott, 2008), the insightful digital natives (Palfrey & Gasser, 2010) and the less committal digital generation (Jukes, 2010). There must be an iGeneration somewhere but we haven’t found it. Taking an entirely different tack are the names me-first generation (Lipkin, 2009), meaning they are a tad self-involved, and echo-boom generation (Alch, 2000), referring to the fact that these are the P ge 26559.3 children of the baby boomers, not booming like their parents, just echoing, and so it goes. As of this writing millennials leads the pack in popularity with generation Y following second but seeming to have faded because it may or may not refer to a somewhat older group of young people. (p. 5)... Two of the many characteristics of this study and reported findings are the digital nature of this most recent cohort and the climate of continual change in which they live. Colleges must educate this generation of undergraduates to thrive in an era of continuing change, to live productive and successful lives. A majority of undergraduates said their courses would be improved if they made greater use of technology, if their professors knew more about how to use technology, and if more of their classes made use of blended instruction, combining online and in-person classes (p. 165). The parallel to this statement resides in the truth of how many know a grandparent, or for that matter perhaps even a parent, that doesn’t know how to use Facebook or how to tweet, or even for that matter how to text on a smartphone? The Millennials, live in an anytime and anyplace world, operating twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week unbounded by physical location. “This causes a divergence between higher education and digital natives on the goals of education. Universities focus on teaching, the process of education, exposing students to instruction for specific lengths of time, whereas digital natives are more concerned with the outcomes of education, learning, and the mastery of content in the manner of games (p. 166)”. Higher education and digital natives slant toward different methods of instruction. This is reflected in a difference between professors and students who approach knowledge in very different ways. Faculty members may be described as hunters who search for and generate knowledge to answer their questions. Digital natives by contrast are gatherers, who wade through a sea of data available to them in the disciplines, focusing on breadth versus depth of knowledge. Digital natives are oriented more toward group learning and social networking, characterized by collaboration and sharing of content. This causes an ethical challenge for universities, which under certain circumstances view collaboration as cheating and uncited content sharing as plagiarism (p. 167). Higher education as a provider of services is predominantly driven in belief and practice. “That is, the university through its faculty determines the curriculum, the content, the instructional methods, the study materials, and the class schedule. Digital natives tend to be consumer driven, preferring to choose if not the curriculum and content they wish to study, then the instructional Page 26559.4 method by which they learn best, the materials they use to learn and the schedule by which they choose to study (p. 167).” In the December 2012 report titled Knocking at the College Door (WICHE 2012) by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education3, the authors discuss the declining enrollment in institutions of higher education and the changing face of the college student from a racial and cultural perspective: The landscape of American higher education has changed rapidly in recent years and will continue to do so into the future. Simple demographics suggest that some states and regions will continue to see increases in the number of high school graduates, while others will see declines. In addition, the composition of our graduating class will continue to change, with increasing number and shares of the population coming from communities of color... our nation’s leadership position is in peril: the U.S. has slipped to 16th in the share of its young adult population with a college education... The number of high school graduates overall having peaked during the 20102011 academic year, all four regions will see short-term declines in their numbers... Why are College Costs so High? As a nation, we are standing at the precipice of seismic shifts in national and international higher education and public institutions of higher education in particular. “The U.S. economy is stuck in neutral since the last recession, tuition prices are skyrocketing, student loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion, parents, who have leveraged their homes through equity loans and first loans for the second time, are losing faith in the value of education, state funding is dwindling, federal grants are shrinking, and donor dollars are smaller5”. These are the times in which we live. Change is inevitable. We can continue to do what we do, until such time when we can’t, then, we must do something else. This is the prevalence of the literature today. There is a growing trend toward college and university mergers. Marcus6 states “...it’s a kind of private sector-style consolidation that is becoming increasingly common, not only for public institutions, but also for nonprofit, independent ones that can pool their resources and cut their costs in a time of falling budgets and demand for efficiencies in higher education...” Marcus goes on to state “...there have been few mergers of colleges and universities in the past... but