Two Surprising Things about Adult Learners: A Boom and a Difference
By: Curtis Kelly
Editor’s note: a shorter video version of this article, for our online course, is here.
Since Adult Education is my doctoral field, I’ve learned quite a bit about the topic, some of it surprising. Look below, for example. In earlier speeches I did on adult education, I showed this slide. I asked what it represented. I added it had to do with adults and Japanese universities. After some hints and prodding, someone would always guess correctly that it represented the number of adults (over 25) enrolled in Japanese universities.
4,224
Then I showed the next slide, saying it was related to adult education in America. What do you, fine reader, think it represents?
590,000
You probably guessed it represents the number of adults in U.S. universities. But if so, you fell for my trap! It actually represents…and hold onto your seats…the total number of adult educators in America, as estimated by The Occupational Outlook Handbook, and that shows how far ahead the US was, and unfortunately still is, in adult education.
The point is, that in the last 40 years, English-speaking countries experienced an adult education boom, and we will look at a couple causes for it in this article, as well as how adult learners are different. Let me share one cause now for anyone teaching 3rd generation, or elderly, adult learners. I found through my research that the main factor predicting whether an older person will engage in formal study after retiring is whether or not they went to college in their youth. Educated people (who also have more money) are more likely to keep educating themselves.
Adult Education in the last 50 years
Well, many of us have adult learners these days, often mixed in with younger college students, and some of us teach just adults. But it was not always like this. Before the eighties, there were almost no older learners in colleges anywhere, and experts in the US, looking at the decrease in births after the baby boom, predicted that the eighties would bring a 40% decline in college enrollments (Kerr, 1979, p. 2).
They could not have been more wrong. From 1972 to 1994, university enrollments went up an astounding 36%. Two-year colleges, which were initially expected to suffer the most, did even better. Their enrollments almost doubled, going from 2.8 million in 1972 to 5.5 million in 1994 (Jones, 1996). Why were they so far off the mark? It was because they did not factor in the huge number of adults that would flock back to school in the eighties. Even by 1986, over 30% of the students in higher education were 25 or older (Parnell, 1990), which is the most commonly accepted definition of “adult student,” and by 1996, adults comprised 43.5% of all part-time and full-time students in American colleges (NCES, 1997). That figure has decreased in this decade (Education Data Initiative, 2025), probably for the same reasons there was a boom in the eighties. So, what caused that boom and bust? It all has to do with curves.
Population demographics look like sine wave curves, not straight lines. The peak of the U.S. population curve, typical of other English-speaking countries, came with the Baby Boomers, who reached college age from 1964-1983. After the Boomers, until the end of the century, that mountain turned into a valley, due to fewer births and a smaller number of college-aged kids. In other words, there was a boom and bust.
Which group you were born into, the Baby Boomers or Gen X has a big effect on your attitudes and work ethics. (Millennials, we will get to you later.) Those of you born in the boom, just because there were so many more of you, had to work much harder to get into good schools and get higher-paying jobs, making you constantly, for your entire life, push harder and show more grit. Those of you born in the bust have had it easier, with less pressure (which is why the Boomers complain about your laxity). I’ll leave it up to you to decide which generation you think is cursed or blessed.
I came across another surprise while writing this. Although the Baby Boomers were long said to be the generation with the most members, and thus the most pressure in education and employment, they are no longer at the top of the heap. According to the Pew Research Center, the Millennials recently surpassed the Baby Boomers in numbers (Fry, 2020). The pressure is back on. I wonder if this is why young people in the US today, like my teen daughters, face so many difficulties getting into choice universities.
Anyway, the demographic curve was why there was an adult education boom in the eighties. Those competitive Boomers, trying to secure professional opportunities, flocked back to school. When they did, college teachers were suddenly faced with a dilemma. “I have these 40-year olds in my class of 18-year olds. And I’m only 38. But I guess I should just teach them like everyone else.”
Wrong. The usual pedagogy of top-down teaching, which tends to be directive, might work with subservient youth—after all, “pedagogy” is the Greek pais (child) and agōgos (leader/guide)—but it rarely works with adults (unless, it is argued, they know nothing about the subject).
Incoming adults might expect to be treated like younger college students, but when they were, during the adult education boom, dropout rates soared–often 50%. Traditional pedagogies did not fit them (Knowles, 1990). This problem stimulated a new area of research, and the new academic field of adult education, also known as “andragogy,” (Cross, 1981; Knox, 1986; Merriam & Caffarella, 1991), a term coined by the leader of that field, Malcolm Knowles.[1]
[1] I am proud to say that Malcolm helped design the splendid Adult Education doctoral program I went through at Nova Southeastern University. I was constantly in awe of how perfectly it was designed to fit adult needs. Write me if you want to hear about it.
How adults learn differently
In the nineties, Knowles published a number of books on how adult learners are different. I have found his claims fit adult language learners just as well as other learners, so I’d like to share a few of his points.[2] Note these are not verbatim. I have revised them a bit.
[2] Disclaimer: Assuming none of you have read it, I am going to paraphrase what I wrote on teaching adults in a Think Tank way back in our first year. That issue is here.
Adults are non-dependent learners
The most important difference in adult learners is their higher level of maturity. They prefer to be self-directed, non-dependent learners (Knowles et al., 1998). They might come into your classroom thinking they should act like younger learners, giving the teacher total control, but that is a misplaced assumption. Unless the subject area is completely new to them, adult learners tend to feel uneasy giving someone else the control. As a result, they do not always respond well to our traditional methods: the lecture-test format, Q-A instead of discussion, fixed report topics, and so on.
The takeaway
The key here, then, is letting adult learners make their own decisions when possible. Forgo the teacher-centered approach and opt for personalization, flexibility and empowering them to shape their own study. Think of yourself as a coach, or co-learner, rather than teacher. In fact, in the field of adult education, rather than “student and teacher,” the preferred terminology is “learner and facilitator.” You might also let them determine the criteria of assessment. Many adult educators, myself included, use individualized “learning contracts” like the ones here. After all, as Knowles taught us, all assessment must start with the learners.
Adults are already out in the world
Adults have a reason for preferring control. Whereas education for younger learners is oriented towards preparing them to live in the adult world, adult learners are already there, often with careers, families, and real-world problems to solve. Therefore, the way we educate youth—filling empty vessels with a broad assortment of knowledge and skills that might be useful later (Freire’s “educational banking”)—does not fit adult learners as well. They are already in the “later.” They tend to have specific, real-world problems to solve and come to school to find tools that can help. Newlyweds want to learn about interpersonal communication and child raising; company employees want to learn about marketing and international tax laws; retirees want to learn about money management and healthcare. Interestingly, adults also come to school for less direct reasons, such as to meet others or keep their brains active, but these can also be considered life-centered problems.
The takeaway
Since adults prefer learning that helps them solve the problems thrown at them by life, they are task-centered in their orientation towards learning. They want to see how their studies apply to their lives, so whenever possible, learning should be oriented towards solving real problems in real-life situations. This applies to language learners as well. For example, adults are much more likely to sign up for a course called “Writing Better Business Letters” than “Composition 1.”
I once had a surprising experience that illustrates the life-centeredness of adult learners. In a self-presentation skills workshop at Kansai Electric Company in Japan, I asked the learners, company employees, to imagine they were talking to English speakers about their company. I gave them the company’s online English mission statement, which was truly mind-numbing, and told them to come up with something better. They struggled. Then I gave them an example that I did not think was anything special: “Our mission is to be invisible. We want to provide you with electricity anywhere, anytime, and all the time, so that you never have to think about it,” but as I delivered these lines, I noticed a ripple of emotion running through the participants. It seemed my mundane example was connected to a real problem they had been mentally struggling with for a long time.
Kansai Electric building
Another example of the adult tendency to use education to solve real life problems can be seen in the way we attend ELT conferences. If I am struggling with a reading class, I am much more likely to attend presentations on reading instruction than grammar, social justice, or research on fricatives, even though I know far less about those other subjects.
So how do we help adults connect the class topics to their own lives? One answer, and something we rarely did when I taught in Japan, is to include time for discussion. “Discuss what you should do if you can’t understand what an English speaker is saying.” “How would you ask someone from Canada out for lunch?” The discussion will almost certainly veer off into “war stories” as they bring in their own problems and experiences (and sometimes you need to intervene to get them back on track), but this is how they amalgamate their new skills into real-world solutions. Even if the subject matter is not related to problems the learners face, discussion helps them integrate new concepts into already well-developed schemata. Educators like Knowles (1990) think discussion should be the core of the class plan.
If that doesn’t work, another technique prominent in adult education, reflection, could be used to get the same results. After teaching a language topic, you might assign the task (even to just the one adult learner): “Write down three situations in your life where you might use this language.
Adult learners’ motivation is intrinsic
Top-down motivators, like testing, scoring, and scolding, might not always be received well.
Since adult learners are actively trying to find ways to improve their lives, they are motivated by personal payoff. It follows then, that extrinsic, top-down motivators, like testing, scoring, and scolding, might not be received well. Adult learners appreciate being treated like adults.
Related to the above, I once had an epiphany in an adult education course I took. I had to fly to Phoenix, Arizona to take this one particular class. I had planned to arrive a day early to finish the paper I had been assigned. To my horror, I was bumped off my scheduled flight and had to spend the night in the airport. The next day I rushed to the class as soon as I arrived, but without my paper. When I started to explain to the teacher why I had not done it yet, she stopped me and said, “You are an adult. You probably have valid reasons for not doing your paper, and I don’t really need to hear them. I just want to know when you are going to get it to me.”
What a valuable experience that was! She not only made me realize that I was acting like an immature, dependent learner, she also taught me the important principle of fostering horizontal rather than vertical relationships with adult learners. I sometimes repeated her very words to my own 3rd and 4th year college students.
The takeaway
It is simple. Don’t be a teacher; be a coach, even if you maintain strict standards.
Adult learners face different barriers
While self-directed adults might be more motivated to come to class, they are also likely to have more problems that prevent participation. In addition to physical weaknesses in older learners, adults are likely to have jobs to go to, children or aging parents to take care of, and other responsibilities to manage.
Cross (1981) noted that many adults also face “dispositional barriers,” meaning a negative attitude towards themselves as learners. These negative self-images are often present in older adults, learners who had trouble in school when younger, or learners with a lower level of prior education.
The takeaway
Offering adult learners flexibility in scheduling and attendance is a must, and it is important to let them know you do this. Likewise, don’t assume non-attendance is laxity. Using the same attitude as my teacher in Phoenix will help them reframe their self-concept as a learner. Also, if your school wants to attract mature students, make sure it offers parking!
A finish with a turn
After Malcolm Knowles wrote about these differences and how to teach adults (1980, 1990), a strange thing happened. Teachers of traditional students, even those teaching children, started telling him that those same techniques worked in their schools as well (Knowles et al, 1998). Younger students also prefer study that is life-centered, offers opportunities for discussion, and uses a problem-based learning approach. Younger learners might be weaker at self-direction, with less real-world experience to connect their learning to, but the same principles still apply. The difference with adult learners is just a matter of degree: their need for an andragogical approach is stronger and they are less tolerant of situations in which the teacher has total control.
I started noticing this tendency with my university students as well. Although 1st year, and to some degree 2nd year, students are more likely to be dependent learners, they still seemed to appreciate techniques I brought in from adult education, as long as they were appropriately scaffolded with stringent rules. And with my 3rd and 4th year students, on the cusp of adulthood themselves, those techniques worked even better. They seemed to yearn for autonomy, self-direction, and personal relevance in what they had to study.
So now I think that Malcolm Knowles and his peers did not just define a new, separate way of teaching; they just delineated the most basic and profitable way all humans learn, though one that is harder to use with younger learners. Adult teaching methods are not the exception, the way we modify them for children is.
After all, most of the adult learner techniques we discussed above fit snugly into the neuroscience of learning. We now know that emotion, meaning personal relevance, is not just an extra, it is a critical factor in all motivation and learning. (See my article in the Emotion issue). We also believe that the brain learns complex concepts in a metaphorical way, by assembling older networks to make new ones, as suggested by the work of Lakoff and Johnson (2008), also see Metaphor, Anderson (2014; Neural Reuse Theory), and Bergen (2012; Embodied Simulation), and that is why discussion and reflection work. They help learners restructure existing networks to incorporate the new learning. Naturally, for adults, whose existing networks are far more complex, so discussion and reflection are even more important. Restructuring larger networks takes more work.
At the start, in order to simplify the discussion, we laid out a dichotomy between adult and non-adult learners, but now, to some degree, we must discard it. By doing so, using adult education techniques with all learners, we open the door to tremendous rewards. Malcolm Knowles found them. He wrote about how in moving from a traditional to an adult educator, he was the one who changed the most. His words make a fitting close to our discussion:
My self-concept had changed from teacher to facilitator of learning. I saw my role shifting from content transmitter to process manager and—only secondarily—content resource.
In the second place, I experienced myself as adopting a different system of psychic rewards. I had replaced getting my rewards from controlling students with getting my rewards from releasing students. And I found the latter rewards much more satisfying.
Finally, I found myself performing a different set of functions that required a different set of skills. Instead of performing the function of content planner and transmitter, which required primarily presentation skills, I was performing the function of process designer and manager, which required relationship building, needs assessment, involvement of students in planning, linking students to learning resources, and encouraging student initiative.
I have never been tempted since then to revert to the role of teacher. (Knowles et al., p. 253)
Curtis Kelly (EdD) studied adult education in his forties and fifties, so the concepts he learned were personally meaningful at the time. Malcolm Knowles’ words, at the end of this article, still are meaningful and always will be.