Civic universities must engage adult learners

Aveek Bhattacharya (X/Bluesky) is Research Director at the Social Market Foundation. This blog is adapted from Growing adult education, an essay by the same author for the Kerslake Collection.

Last month, alongside her announcement that tuition fees would be increased in line with inflation, Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson wrote to universities setting out her priorities for higher education reform. Among them was an exhortation for universities to ‘create a culture of lifelong learning’, and to ‘play a greater civic role in their communities’. As it happens, I contributed an essay to the Kerslake collection in the summer that argued those two objectives should go together: that engaging adult learners could be one of the best ways for higher education institutions to contribute to their communities.

In our research at the Social Market Foundation, we found that adults who undertook a degree or diploma level course at a university or college saw their incomes rise by 10 percentage points more over five years on average than those who did not (25% vs 15%). The impact was particularly strong for poorer individuals: incredibly, studying at a university or college boosted income growth for those in the bottom income quartile by over 60%. That fits with other research that suggests adult education can raise job satisfaction, carry a wage premium and even boost productivity.

But the benefits are not only – or even primarily – economic: engaging in learning has been shown to develop attributes like self-confidence, individual focus and empowerment – traits helpful in the workplace, but beyond it too. Adult learners, even on hobby courses, have been found to be more likely to give up smoking, take up exercise, and improve their diet. Adult education appears to have psychological benefits too. It has been argued that continued education contributes to a ‘cognitive footprint’ that may delay dementia, and some studies suggest it can have a positive effect on mental health. Is it any surprise, then, that adult education seems to make people happier – raising individuals’ life satisfaction and sense of purpose? In general, people’s life satisfaction tends to fall in middle age – but those who participated in education between the ages of 33 and 42 experienced less of a decline, offsetting 35% of the typical fall.

Beyond this, there are the societal benefits of adult education. Engaging with learning seems to help improve people’s parenting skills and involvement with their children’s education. It also appears to increase civic-mindedness: encouraging people to be better citizens, and improving social cohesion, tolerance, trust, and participation in the democratic process. Adult learners are more likely to participate in clubs and associations.

Universities’ role in adult learning has not been particularly creditable in recent years. There was a collapse in mature undergraduate numbers following the introduction of £9,000 fees, from over 400,000 in 2010/11 to 240,000 in 2017/18, a drop of 40%. There has been a modest uptick since then, but we remain well short of the previous heights. In part, this reflects the design of the student loan system, which has made it very difficult to borrow for part-time courses.

The most prominent current policy initiative to address this issue is the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), which gives people who have not been to university access to student finance. Bridget Phillipson’s letter explicitly urged the sector to work with the Government to ensure it is ‘making the most of the opportunity’.

The key challenge, as I see it, for universities, is around their offerings. Can they develop flexible, modular courses of the sort that work around the lifestyles and commitments of adult learners? In the 2010s, universities seemed to neglect mature learners, prioritising the relatively easy money of full-time undergraduate courses, and international students. A more challenging funding environment may encourage them to be more innovative and civic-minded. Yet universities can be conservative and inflexible – as the lack of progress on credit transfer has shown – so progress for adult learners cannot be taken for granted.

The LLE is not the only game in town, however. There are also opportunities to engage with Skills England and Local Skills Improvement Plans, which seek to root the educational offer in a particular area in the future economic needs of that place. Especially when it comes to reskilling, it would be better to involve universities more in such processes and bring their expertise and resources to bear. Devolved administrations with greater control over adult education budgets present another forum for engagement with local policymakers.

There are other – less economistic – ways for universities to serve adult learners. The striking thing about many of the personal and social benefits from adult learning outlined in the section above is that they can come from less formal ‘hobby courses’ as well as degree-level study. Those sorts of courses – things like arts, crafts or languages – tend, to the extent they have survived, to be delivered through colleges. But they need not be. If part of the objective of the civic university is to close the gap between the research carried out by academics, and the communities they are embedded in, we can certainly imagine small, accessible courses in subjects like history, psychology, sociology that help to kindle and sustain love of learning among adults in the community. Some such courses may even run on commercial grounds or could operate as ‘tasters’ for those that might be tempted to continue on to earn full qualifications.

Universities have come to be identified with delivering education to young people emerging from school, readying them for the workforce. Even when we think about mature university students, we usually imagine them to be learning career-appropriate skills. Those functions are doubtless important, and likely to be the bread and butter of universities for years to come. But to achieve their civic goals, to improve people’s lives, to be more relevant to their local communities, and potentially identify some alternative revenue sources, universities could do worse than broaden their view and broaden their offers.