‘I don’t feel like ‘a student’, I feel like ‘me’!’: the over‐simplification of mature learners’ experience(s)

Abstract

Many studies of mature students within further and higher education portray them as a distinct social category with particular shared characteristics. Such representations are sometimes sub‐divided further along lines of social division. For instance, attempts to determine ‘types’ of mature learners have variously identified class, ethnicity, gender and age as being of key importance. This paper examines the utility of such attempts to categorise older learners by drawing upon data from a longitudinal study of students on a further education ‘Access to HE’, and subsequent university courses. It demonstrates that mature students are a diverse and heterogeneous group, with the ‘reality’ of their experience(s) being too complex, too individually situated, for meaningful representation otherwise.

Notes

1. Access courses are a ‘fast‐track’, usually full‐time, course for people aged 21 and over with few or no formal academic qualifications. They offer a combination of compulsory generic core skills and optional subject specialisms. Their aim is essentially to equip a student for, and facilitate admission to, an HE course of study.

2. I am grateful to my colleague, Jonathan Simmons, for suggesting this idea during a discussion on the topic.

3. The students’ names are their chosen pseudonym. One or two minor biographical details have occasionally been changed to further disguise their identities.

4. This assumes they actually know now, a position contradicted by the relatively large numbers altering study plans while on the Access course and/or at university itself. Seven of the 20 in the bigger study have done this, including Meg and Akhtar here. The statement is also predicated on the idea that younger students in HE do know what they want to do, which again is challenged by the numbers dropping out or switching courses.

5. Although she successfully completed the Access course and started university as planned, Meg left within a month, uncertain she had embarked upon the appropriate degree course (see note 4). She returned to FE and started an A‐level programme, to both try new subjects and buy more time to decide what she wanted to study. However, she then joined the police rather than recommencing degree studies.