The Wiley Handbook of Gender Equity in Higher Education

13“Non‐Traditional” Learners and Twenty‐First‐Century Higher Education: The Ongoing Project of Inclusion

Susan B. Marine

Picture in your mind a “typical” college or university scene. While each reader inhabits a unique environment, chances are many of the following will appear: picturesque lawns and courtyards, large, stately buildings full of classrooms and offices, faculty and staff with briefcases, heading to meetings, classes, or the library, and, of course, students. Students, scurrying about campus to get to their classrooms, book bags slung over their shoulders or perhaps balanced on a bicycle. Their expressions are wry and hopeful, or they may bear the signs of fatigue from long nights of studying and socializing. They may be dressed in any style, and be of any gender, race, cultural tradition, or degree of affluence. But the world over, what most college students are imagined to be is young.

Indeed, while this may be the stereotype, notions of who properly constitutes a “typical college student” have expanded worldwide to include an ever‐widening definition of who pursues higher education. Yet, popular media, public policy discourses, and cultural messages that link schooling irrevocably to youth continue to foment the idea that college students are typically – even when the data tell us otherwise – young adults, people who have immediately or fairly recently completed secondary education and are now launching into adult professional life via a postsecondary degree. ...