Adults earning degrees get what they expected--and more.(In Her Own Words)

During my 30+ years of working with adult students, I have been intrigued by the personal, non-academic dividends that many adults earn when they achieve an educational goal.

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Documenting this phenomenon was a factor in my choice of a topic for a dissertation study I completed in 2002 in partial fulfillment of my PhD in Learning and Change in Human Systems at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

The inquiry

My qualitative inquiry primarily explored the expected and unexpected outcomes reported by 18 recent graduates of an adult bachelor's degree completion program at Dominican University of California, where I work as an academic advisor. A secondary question involved finding out whether students who took their coursework together as a cohort experienced different outcomes than their non-cohort colleagues.

Women were 14 of the 18 students (77.8%), mirroring the adult student body of 84.3% women at the time.

While most institutional assessment is driven by the goals of the college, qualitative research methods gave me an opportunity to focus on the intrinsic perceptions of the students as they described their expectations and experiences in their own words. For example, rather than determining whether adult students obtained the outcomes that the university established for them, I wanted to know whether the students achieved what they themselves wanted and expected.