"Lace designer Jonathan Adkins moved to Virginia in 1986 from Nottingham, England, to work at Liberty Fabrics in Gordonsville. In 2001, after 15 years there, he was laid off with its 344 other workers when the plant closed because of foreign competition.

In his mid-50s and out of work, Adkins was unsure what his next step would be. He decided to use a federal stipend that fully funded study toward an associate’s degree at Piedmont Virginia Community College, and Adkins reignited his childhood dream to be a surgeon by earning a diploma in surgical technology.

At 64, he now works as a surgical technician at Martha Jefferson Hospital, handing instruments to surgeons during operations.

It is becoming more necessary to America’s economy for adults in the work force to return to college to earn a degree, according to a report released by several University of Virginia education professors.The progress that America makes in getting more working adults to earn college degrees will be a decisive factor in maintaining the nation’s economic competitiveness globally, the report says.

There are currently about 150 million people in the nation’s work force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of those, 54 million adults lack college degrees, the UVa report states, and of those, 34 million have no college experience at all.

“In the 21st century, those numbers cannot sustain us,” the report says.

Brian Pusser, one of the UVa professors who worked on the study, said that, historically, selective four-year residential colleges - such as UVa and Virginia Tech - have not focused on helping adults who have already entered the work force to earn degrees, and that has to change, he said.

“A lot of the research and a lot of the attention in higher education in this country is focused on residential life colleges,” Pusser said. “We spend about 90 percent of the time in higher education talking about 5 percent of the institutions.”

In fact, 82 percent of post-secondary students in the United States are older than 24 and hold a job, according to the 2000 Census, meaning only one out of every six students was following the traditional college path.

“As the baby boomers age, you’ll find that people are living longer and changing their jobs later in life,” said Mary Lee Walsh, dean of student services at PVCC. “You see so many second and third careers now. Right now, I think the adult population is the one that everyone is courting.”

Overcoming bureaucracy

Adult degree seekers are hard to classify, Walsh said, because they return to school from different points in life - some have been laid off, others are required by their companies to take courses in order to update their skills and some voluntarily choose to arm themselves with more knowledge.

“A lot of times there are plant closings,” she said. “However, a lot of people who we see that come from the work force haven’t been laid off, but they’re not progressing in their field. They don’t have the skills to do that. They aren’t getting ahead because younger people are coming into the company with a bachelor’s degree. A degree assures career advancement.”

The main hurdle for adults in the work force who want to go back for a degree comes with transferring the skills they developed as employees and quantifying them into credits used toward a diploma.

“Businesses need to work with colleges to overcome bureaucracy,” said John Downey, vice president at Blue Ridge Community College in Weyers Cave.

To keep up with ever-evolving technologies, businesses provide employees with their own college-level training that is catered toward specific company needs. Since this training does not include credits, Downey said it is difficult to place a value on the acquired skills and transfer them to a college transcript if the employee wants to pursue a degree.

This value judgment is especially tricky for traditional residential colleges that are held to strict accountability measures and face comparisons to other schools they compete with for students, Walsh said.

“How do you make sure you have a consistency of standards?” she said, outlining the questions that higher education and companies are now facing as they balance skill sets with credentials. “What are the skills that a person has from the work force versus that person who is taking a class? How do you know that a person taking a leadership class is the same as a person who was a supervisor?”

Walsh pointed to PVCC’s guaranteed admission agreement with UVa, put in place in the fall, as a sign of progress in supporting adult learners in higher education. To be eligible, PVCC students must complete at least 54 credit hours and hold a 3.4 GPA, among other stipulations. They then can work toward earning a bachelor’s degree at UVa, regardless of their age.

“The most prestigious public college in our area is saying, ‘You don’t have to come right out of high school,’” Walsh said. “That’s a great open door not just for the traditional-age student, but for adult students as well.”

Connecting two worlds

Flexibility. Critical thinking. Technical and interpersonal skills. As the needs of companies change more rapidly than ever, so too do the skill sets they require from their employees, but Walsh said these particular traits are becoming basic for any field.

“If you’re wedded to one skill and you’re good at it, but you’re not willing to change and be innovative, you’re not going to last,” she said.

Job skills, especially in vocational and technical fields, have become a moving target, said Bob Miller, dean of business and technologies at PVCC.

“It’s a never-ending cycle, and for people and corporations, that means constant re-training,” Miller said.

Businesses and colleges should encourage those taking re-training courses to shoot for a full-fledged degree, Miller and Walsh said.

“I don’t think we need one system,” said Nancy Krippel, dean of adult and graduate studies at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton. “There needs to be a school or program for almost any type of student. That allows them to work far more at their own pace and with their own schedule.”

Mary Baldwin has started to organize skill portfolios for adult degree seekers that match the skills developed in the workplace with the skills covered in credited courses. That way, there is a more fluid transfer from work to school that attempts to weed out skill overlaps, Krippel said.

Pusser hopes his report can further shed light on the need for these types of smooth transitions that connect adults in the work force with higher education.

“How, as a country, as a labor market and as institutions, we adapt to that change,” he said, “is going to go a long way to determine how competitive we are.”" (Matt Deegan, The Daily Progress, May 27, 2007)