| Four types of adult education institutions deliver 85 percent of all courses taken by adults over 25 years of age in this country. These are local institutions, including schools and community organizations; two-year colleges; four-year colleges; and on-the-job training providers, including employers, professional associations and unions. Courses are taken for vocational, avocational and self-fulfillment purposes.;These findings provide an explanation of why adult education participation rates differ for different segments of the adult population. Previous findings have attributed these differences to varying degrees of adult development, socioeconomic status achievement and socio-political barriers such as location, cost, race and gender. This study furthers this explanation by showing institutions serve specific types of adults and that those groups having the highest participation rates are also the adults having access to all institution types. Certain segments of the adult population have less access to four-year colleges, on-the-job training and local institutions, which provides an alternative explanation for lower participation rates. Means for providing equal opportunity also are discussed.;The objective of this study is to examine how each institution type is distinguished by the clientele they serve. Through examination of previous findings demonstrating how adult education participants are distinguished from nonparticipants and bivariate analyses of the NCES 1981 Survey of Adult Education showing how participants are distinguished by type of institution attended, a set of seven variables are identified for consideration in a discriminant analysis. This analysis is designed to show how explained between-group differences enable one to improve the ability to explain who attends what type of institution. The findings demonstrate that these seven discriminating variables help classify as much as 60 percent of all participants into the correct type of institution attended. This improves the ability to predict the type of institution attended by adult education participants by nearly 50 percent over random chance. |
