The current academic term "non-traditional student," in practical reality and with very great irony, describes what actually students have traditionally been meant to be.

Monday, June 18, 2001

The current academic term "non-traditional student," in practical reality and with very great irony, describes what actually students have traditionally been meant to be. "Non-traditional," of course, indicates an older person who has returned to college in distinction from a teen-ager who has just graduated from high school. A student cannot be fairly termed non-traditional simply by returning to college, but should be respected as within historical student tradition if the student’s goal is actually to study and really to learn.

The non-traditional students (accommodating to the quantitative term) I have had in classes range from those who went to work for a few years upon high school graduation to those in early middle-age who came to career ends to elderly whose retirement has allowed them to do what they could not have done many years ago.

Some in the first group had even dropped out of high school and then either returned to high school to complete their work or passed GED (General Educational Development) tests. Most started out in a job that appeared to pay well when compared with part-time work for a single person but came to recognize it did not provide a family income. Others found jobs tolerable for a couple of years, but could not bear doing it for life.

Some in the middle group did well for a number of years but came to feel that life has to have more to it than just a job. A large proportion were women who bailed out or were thrown out of a marriage with several children and now had to become the bread-winner for a fatherless family.

A large number of the elderly simply could not have afforded to attend college in a day with scant student loans and grants. Some were discouraged from college because people in their families just didn’t go to college. Women were at times not allowed by their fathers to attend. Many simply wanted to enrich their lives with a more liberal education.

The Chicago college in which I taught responsibly made special provision for a limited number of such students, but it is in community colleges that I meet the greater number. When I am asked to teach an evening class, I gladly surrender my evenings at home in favor of a class that will be entirely or largely working people who want to learn.

Most of these students, especially those integrated into the "traditional" students in day classes on campus, feel strongly intimidated by the situation and even the younger students themselves. They come in trembling fear that the recent high school graduates will outscore them without even trying. They are correct that many of them will not try, but they don’t score either. "They’re used to studying," older students complain. No, they’re not. Most high school students don’t study, but only think they do because they have never done any. I tell them if the older students recognize they do not know how to study, they will learn and be miles ahead of the kids. What makes the difference is a sense of purpose and commitment to the task-and hard work.

They do not take classes for granted, and they appreciate what is done for them. They have learned how to get along with bosses and find relating to professors to be easy in comparison. They are more reasonable in what to expect from a professor and more conscious of their own responsibility. Most interesting, they are both more forgiving of professors’ honest efforts but intolerant of incompetence. They know how to work. They look for ways to use what they learn in class in their daily lives.

In a literature class, no one could explain the feelings expressed in a certain poem. Only one older person, a mother of teen-agers, was in this class. I watched the changing expressions on her face. I saw her face light when she gasped the thought and then became puzzled when others did not. I intentionally held her off and went to each of the others. Her face now registered disgust. When none of the "traditional" students could expound the poet’s concept, I allowed her and she gave a complete and profound answer. Someone asked, "How did you know?" She turned to the class, for she sat herself in the front row: "It’s life experience, kids. Life experience."

I have had in the same class a 16-year-old post-secondary girl and a 68-year-old grandmother, and more than once I have had both mother and daughter (although never father and son) in the same class. Such a range presents the instructor with unique challenges, but I have found advantages. The older students help me with the younger, and they learn the more by doing so.

Not every person who could benefit from college should enter directly upon high school graduation. Some would benefit measurably by taking some time out of academia to attend the proverbial "school of hard knocks." If they will learn there to work and accept responsibility, they can begin college learning in the first year of college and experience the full four-years of college learning.

I must allow this. Community colleges, in which I observed most of the above, by their very nature have both a greater number of non-traditional students and a greater number of non-serious students than do four-year liberal arts colleges. The contrast is greater, then, in the community colleges.

What is the definition of a student, after all? It is one who wants to learn, who works at learning, who does learn, and who uses what is learned. In my experience, that describes more consistently what has come to be termed technically as the "non-traditional" student. Such demonstrates the historic tradition of students, so that "traditional" students can learn from them the genuine tradition of being a student, i.e., to work to learn.

Wallace Alcorn’s column appears Mondays.