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On Campus

Let’s Waste College on the Old

Credit...Brian Britigan

Usually, when a demographic group is significantly underrepresented on elite college campuses, we consider it a problem. But there is one such problem that almost no one seems to notice or care much about. Nearly 30 percent of college undergraduates are adults, defined by the United States Department of Education as 25 years old or older. But at Stanford, the share of undergraduates who are adults is 1.2 percent; at Yale, 0.7 percent; at Princeton, 0.6 percent; at the University of Chicago, 0.2 percent.

This blatant discrepancy hasn’t drawn any sustained attention even from liberal elites who otherwise tend to notice these things. That’s a testament to the notion many of us carry around in our heads, often based on our own experience, that colleges are places filled with fresh-faced young people who recently graduated from high school. But outside of elite colleges that image is less and less accurate in higher education today.

The pool of graduating high school seniors is shrinking as the huge millennial generation ages. Meanwhile, more and more people who didn’t go to college, or who went but didn’t finish, are realizing that their lack of a degree is keeping them from getting ahead. Many of these adult students are veterans cycling out of the military after years of service.

To find out which colleges are best serving this large and growing population of adult students, my magazine, The Washington Monthly, created a ranking of four- and two-year colleges based on adult-specific metrics. We looked at the percentage of a school’s student body that’s 25 and older; tuition charges, student-loan repayment rates and median future earnings; and adult-friendly factors like how many classes are offered on evenings and weekends, when adult students juggling jobs and family responsibilities can actually attend.

You might expect that for-profit colleges would dominate the list, since responding to new and growing markets is something the private sector is usually good at. But only one for-profit made it into the top 100 four-year schools, and only three made the top 100 for two-year schools. For-profits do enroll large numbers of adult learners, but they don’t provide good value: They charge too much relative to other schools and don’t deliver the increased future salaries that most adult students are looking for. On the other hand, highly selective colleges hardly enroll any adults at all, which is why only one, the College of William & Mary, cracked the top 100 four-year schools.

Instead, the schools that dominate our lists are second-tier regional public universities and unheralded private colleges. The No. 1 four-year institution is Golden Gate University in San Francisco, where 89 percent of students are 25 and older and the median adult student earns almost $75,000 per year 10 years after entering. Golden Gate also does well on measures of adult student friendliness, like how easy it is to transfer credits a student may have completed 10 years ago at another school.

A school like Golden Gate should be a model for how other institutions can adapt to the newer, older face of American college students. The problem for for-profits is that doing the job right just isn’t very profitable, while elite nonprofit colleges face little pressure to recruit adult students. Schools like Stanford and Yale could fill each freshman class exclusively with upper-middle-class 18-year-olds if they wanted (and they basically do).

Compounding the problem is that the best-known arbiters of college quality, like U.S. News & World Report, reward schools for prestige and selectivity, not for serving the needs of adults and all the other students who actually make up most of America’s college classrooms.

That’s a shame. Elite universities pride themselves on creating diverse learning environments, but by ignoring adult students, they’re missing out on a tremendous opportunity to bring different perspectives into the classroom. Schools like Princeton and the University of Chicago train a disproportionate share of future leaders in government and business. Shouldn’t those groups include students who have, say, worked as a nurse in an I.C.U., or supervised a factory floor, or trained combat troops as an noncommissioned officer? And shouldn’t the 18-year-old future leaders of America interact with and learn from people with those experiences?

One might object that seats at highly selective universities are so rare and valuable that they should be reserved strictly for the young, whose whole lives are ahead of them. But if elite universities expanded the size of their incoming classes — something few of them have done in decades despite soaring demand — adult students could be accommodated without younger ones being displaced.

In our reporting on adult learners, we found schools around the country — ones with far fewer resources than most elite private universities — that are developing innovative ways to make college work better for the grown-ups they serve. Broward College, in Florida, for instance, now has courses in which students earn not only college credit but industry certifications to guarantee that they are job-ready, while Southern New Hampshire University offers fully online bachelor’s degrees that adults can earn quickly by demonstrating mastery of knowledge and skills that they picked up on the job.

It wouldn’t be hard for prestigious universities to adapt themselves for prospective adult students — and there are plenty — who could compete in and benefit from attending those schools. With their multibillion-dollar endowments, they have the resources they need to expand class sizes, offer credit for prior learning, and aggressively recruit enough qualified adult students to at least match the 30 percent figure of adult college students nationwide.

Doing so might also help these elite schools diversify racially and geographically, since many standout adult students come from underrepresented urban and rural backgrounds. But before the problem of too few adult students on elite campuses can be fixed, first we have to admit that we have a problem at all.

Paul Glastris (@glastris) is the editor in chief of The Washington Monthly.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: Let’s Waste College On the Old. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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