1995 Volume 1995 Issue 21 Pages 109-119,217
Australia has one of the highest levels of adult students who are 25 years old and over in higher education.
There are three primary factors which caused the increase in this adult student enrollment from the 1970s. The first is that institutions tried to get rid of institutional barriers for adult student enrollment. The second is that women who were over 30 years old had fewer social barriers to participation in higher education than they had faced in the 1960s. The third is related to the employment sector. A single period of professional training immediately following secondary schooling became inappropriate. At the same time, qualification inflation occurred. Therefore, more adults began to retrain.
In the early 1980s, the demand for higher education from school leavers as well as adults started to grow, but the commonwealth government couldn't deal with the sudden increase in demand. Therefore, many qualified young people who were facing unemployment were denied entrance. In reaction, the commonwealth government decided to give priority to teenagers, especially school leavers. Opportunities for access by adult students suffered as the demand for places for school leavers rose. The increase in adult students was halted in the middle of the 1980s.
In higher education reform since 1988, the government has increased university places, but the demand, especially from school leavers, has continued to grow more than the government had expected. A number of institutions, however, gave preference to adult students and tried to expand provisions for postgraduate students. As a result, the unmet demand for higher education among school leavers rose to a higher level. The government then tried to introduce some policies to correct this problem. One of these would have imposed barriers on recyclers, most ofwhom are adult students. However, many people protested against this, and the policy was rejected in the Senate.
Since the middle of the 1980s, the government has given less priority to opportunities for adults than for the younger generation. Even so opportunities for adults have been maintained because institutions highly evaluate them and people recognize the importance of opportunities for them. We can say that in Australian higher education, a recurrent educational system has taken root. It is expected that in the future Australian higher education will be seen less as a resource for the 17-19 year old cohort because of demographical and economic factors. Recurrent education will also increasingly shift to the postgraduate level as much of the workforce has initial qualifications.
