Tales from the Medway

Linden West talks to adult learners about the problems they face. It is a cliche that higher education has changed and will continue to do so, rapidly. Many of the changes were desirable and overdue, including greater participation by adult learners in universities.

Adults, taken as students over the age of 21, now constitute the majority and the image of university as a finishing school for a privileged elite of 18-year-olds has, it seems, shattered. Yet wider access has coincided with acute cash constraints and deep uncertainty about what higher education is for, how it is to be managed and the role and status of academics. These are hard, uncertain, questioning times.

Such issues surfaced in a recent biographical and longitudinal study of 30 adults, which was financed by the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The students entered higher education via access programmes and progressed, in most cases, towards a degree. Most came from two communities experiencing big economic and social dislocations - the Medway towns and Thanet in Kent - with the collapse of traditional employment and/or patterns of social exclusion.

The localities were chosen as typical of many working-class communities and marginalised people. The students were a mixture of working and middle class, black and white, women and men, older and younger adults.

The research focused on motivation and what, educationally and personally, enabled such learners to continue (or not), even in the worst of times.

The learners constantly referred to the frightening changes and fracturing identities in their lives: in the collapse of work, for instance, and the disintegration of previous biographical certainties.

Higher education could be considered a transitional, supportive, comparatively stable space in which to take stock and also to experiment; except, the picture drawn of institutions by students was ambiguous, ambivalent, even turbulent.

Part of the problem was the difficulty of funding study; another inadequate facilities in institutions.

A recent report for the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals noted that mature students were particularly likely to drop out. While mature students over the age of 21 make up a third of full-time home undergraduates, they account for 40 per cent of drop-outs.

Most of the students in the Medway and Thanet area entered further education colleges, probably the most under-resourced part of the system. Such learners struggled to keep going on meagre grants or to pay for studies, as well as families, through part-time poorly paid employment.

In one interview, Jim, a working-class man made redundant from the building industry, broke down as he talked of running out of money on the day of an interview. As I offered a cup of coffee he described how his children had gone to school without a hot drink that morning. He felt guilty at being in higher education at all.

Book shortages and inadequate college resources were a constant source of complaint: "For the law section at college we've only got two shelves," as one student put it.

Another student in the same institution described how students had pressed for more books and they appeared at the end of the academic year, immediately prior to a visit by inspectors from the parent, franchising university.

Other problems emanated from the changing culture of higher education itself. The further education sector has had a turbulent time. Many of the learners were distressed by what they perceived to be mismanagement, conflict and disagreement in particular colleges. They wondered about what to do and whether all their efforts might be wasted.

A number were being forced, for example, against their expectations and wishes, to complete degrees in London at the campus of the franchising university. It was difficult for most to travel because of childcare commitments or other responsibilities and many contemplated abandoning higher education altogether. Some students had even initiated legal action against their college.

The students were disturbed when friends withdrew, and according to one of the learners, only five students were left from the 30 who began a social science foundation course. The problem, one person suggested, was more complex than the location of the final year or how the college had dealt with student complaints.

Contractual disputes and increased workload had badly affected lecturer morale. Some teachers had changed for the worse and he, and others, catalogued a growing dissatisfaction as teachers were asked to do more, on less, and felt devalued by overbearing management. Relations between teachers and learners also suffered.

Some learners transferred to older universities, which could seem unfriendly places at times. The curriculum was felt to be "atomised" and contact with other students, especially for students living off campus, sporadic. Exam procedures and decisions regarding subjects to choose for a degree, with implications for subsequent careers, were confusing and guidance limited. The system appeared to be designed for 18-year-olds straight from school.

The problem was partly one of adjusting to and interpreting a complex bureaucracy and of finding people willing and able to advise on which courses to combine; or to talk about what was required for essays (what place, for instance, has personal experience, and how were essays assessed?). Forms of assessment varied between modules and there was confusion over the weighting of different methods.

Students complained passionately about the lack of feedback on essay writing. Academics themselves may be struggling to adjust to, and may be threatened by, adult learners. Some mature students could be difficult and demanding, on their own admission, but their plea was for attention and reassurance in unfamiliar environments.

There are, however, more positive stories: of good teachers and other students being supportive. Almost all the learners considered fellow students had been vital to their survival and eventual transition. Small informal learning/support groups enabled people to manage academic and personal matters more effectively. A working-class man from the Medway talked, at length, of particular learners he worked with in a group; people who respected him. It was new, he said, for middle-class people to take him seriously.

Such peer support is probably especially significant at times of transition. There were good teachers too who, despite minimal resources or institutional cultures, gave students some of the personal attention and recognition they craved. They could make all the difference between staying on or withdrawal.

One student talked of the professor who liked his essays and how pleased it made him feel because she encouraged him to use his experience in politics; another of a tutor who had met him on the same level, with respect. Another spoke of the seminar leader who had encouraged him to play a lead role in a Moot (a simulation), and had liked what he did; and there was the lecturer who had said "well done" after a student's nervous talk.

Many students, towards the end of the research, continued to be in awe of academic learning and unsure about the connection between their own life experience and formal learning. One simply stated that academic knowledge was more important than personal experience. She wanted cultural capital and social mobility (she had learned the words she said); and, she added, teachers in higher education had confidence and knowledge, which she desired. Yet she wanted her own voice too.

Some teachers and academic cultures greatly inhibit integration between the experiential and conceptual: "It's a red mark on your essay for mentioning personal experience. They just put lines through it, and just say 'do not talk in these terms'," one learner remarked, and he was not alone.

Lecturers can disparage the personal as anecdotal and unreliable in comparison to more "objective" understanding, and thus lose the rich interpretative possibilities of adults' experience. Higher education can mean, in such contexts, leaving the experiential behind in a kind of personal amputation.

Those learners who had most missed out educationally first time round placed greatest emphasis on formal learning and the skills and capital others possessed. Feelings of inadequacy and inferiority may be heightened at university as learners denigrate their own experience, at least initially.

But with greater numbers of adults in higher education the balance could tilt in favour of an experientially based curriculum tuned into the struggles of learners to manage change in a fragmenting culture rather than the preoccupations of disciplines per se or the narrower, if crucial, business of getting employment.

As the doors are pushed open, the culture might shift towards the problems and possibilities of people, communities and cultures in crisis. But, if the democratisation of higher education means managing on decreasing resources, especially in places like the Medway, then the space for reflexive learning - for experiment with self and story - will be severely constrained.

Linden West is lecturer in the theory and practice of continuing education and a senior tutor in the school of continuing education at the University of Kent. His book, Beyond Fragments, adults, motivation and higher education; a biographical analysis, is published this month by Taylor and Francis.