Though much education focus is on the K-12 years, adult access and involvement in continued higher education remains an important goal for workers to build skills and retool in a rapidly expanding knowledge economy. Prior research has indicated that proximity to a public university is an important predictor of whether adults will reengage with higher education in some way, in many cases most likely due to the fact that adults have families, children, and other responsibilities where picking up and moving for higher education opportunities becomes more challenging.
At the same time, the emergence of online learning has also provided expanded opportunities for access to higher education for adults who can’t necessarily move but still wish to engage in lifelong learning opportunities to reskill in some capacity. Thus, it would seem that better understanding the role that geographic proximity to higher education institutions and also the advent of online learning plays would be important to understand how to best serve a broader base of adults interested higher education.
A new study by University of Arkansas researchers Kevin M. Roessger, James Weese, Daniel A. Parker, and Michael S. Hevel published in The Journal of Continuing Higher Education titled “Bridging the distance? How proximity and online learning shape communities’ adult participation in public universities” sought to address these questions. The authors used county level data from the entire state of Arkansas from 1999 to 2018, specially looking at whether a community’s proximity to a public university was associated with adult participation.
The authors conclude: “During the 20 years under investigation in this study, we found modest growth in the proportion of adult participation in the first 5 years, strong growth in the second 5 years, and a slight tapering off during the final 10 years. Despite the downturn in the second half of the study, the proportion of adult students at the end of the study remained much higher than at the start. Yet any decrease is contrary to policymakers’ and politicians’ goals of increased degree attainment for an increasingly knowledge-based economy. Proximity to four-year institutions influenced adult students’ enrollment in complex ways during the two decades of the study. Counties farther away from public four-year institutions experienced higher gains in the proportion of adult students enrolling in these institutions, gains which were likely fueled by the rise of online education. Having started at a much lower rate than counties closer to universities, however, their absolute proportion remained lower. In the end, this means that, despite the growth and promise of online education, living closer to a public university remains a dominant predictor of adult students’ enrollment in them. Given the expense of physical campuses, building new campuses to facilitate enrollment remains unlikely. Therefore, politicians, policymakers, and higher education leaders will have to be creative to ensure that adult students living in diverse places can equally access the benefits of a bachelor’s degree.”
Lead author of the study, Kevin Roessger, noted a couple things the research team found surprising and interesting: “First, we expected that the effect of proximity would lessen as online education proliferated across the state. This didn’t happen. While the growth of online education seemed to increase communities’ adult student enrollment in all areas of the state, it did not decrease disparities between low and high proximity counties. In other words, proximity continued to be a community’s main predictor of enrollment before, during, and after the online education explosion in the 2000s.
Second, we expected that economic factors would be drivers of adult student enrollment. This wasn’t the case either. Neither a community’s unemployment rates nor SNAP participation rates predicted its adult student enrollment. Both were a non-factor. When we looked at the same data with community college enrollment as the outcome, however, both were significant predictors (paper coming soon). It appears that for adult students, university participation is about access, not economics. It is a very different story, though, for community colleges.”
