Adult Students at Two-Year Colleges: A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

Adults constitute a continually increasing proportion of students at two-year colleges. While adult students presumably have special needs, little is known about them. This study focused on the characteristics and needs of 17,137 students enrolled in 100 randomly selected two-year colleges across the country, separately for different age levels. Using a wide variety of variables collected at entrance, after one term, at graduation, and three years after graduation, differences by sex among the following four age groups were ascertained: age 19 or younger, 20–24, 25–39, and 40 or older. Major trends with age, differences among age groups, and interactions between age and sex were found for a number of variables: abilities, grades, attrition, self-perceptions, aspirations and goals, competencies, job values and preferences, satisfaction with and rating of various aspects of the college, expressed needs for help, extracurricular participation, outside work during school, postgraduate jobs obtained and how obtained, job satisfaction, percent going to and graduating from four-year programs, and preference for entering a two-year program if they had to do it all over again. Adult students do have many special needs that vary with age level. We think a repeat of the study but comparing across other groupings of adults would be desirable, even though extreme diversity also exists within such groups. Another consideration is that many new kinds of adult students will in the future be entering postsecondary education in large numbers.     

The transfer of U.S. technology abroad

The causes of the transfer of technology between countries is now seen as an important dimension of the diffusion of new products and processes. Despite its obvious importance, there has been little empirical research investigating the international transfer of technology, although the work of Schiffel and Kitti (Research Policy 7 (1978)) provides a useful foundation on which to build. The research reported below tests the hypothesis that the transfer of technology between countries, as measured by the movement of patented invention, is influenced by both supply side and demand side factors. The principal variables are: patenting activity in the country of origin; the size of the recepient economy; international trade in goods and services; and the operations of multinational producing enterprises. These vaiables explain most of the variation across countries in the transfer of U.S. technology abroad. The worldwide distribution of U.S. based multinational enterprises appear to play an important part in explaining U.S. technology tranfer. On the other hand, the remaining international differences in patent law do not seem to significantly affect patent flows between countries.