4. The Lifelong Learning Market
The Council of Ontario Universities (2012) noted that students NOT coming directly from high school now constitute 24% of all new admissions, and enrolments from this sector are increasing faster than those from students coming directly from high schools. Perhaps more significantly, many graduates are returning later in their careers to take further courses or programs, in order to keep up in their ever-changing knowledge domain. Many of these students are working full-time, have families, and are fitting their studies around their other commitments.
Yet it is economically critical to encourage and support such students, who need to remain competitive in a knowledge-based society, especially as with falling birthrates and longer lives, in some jurisdiction’s lifelong learners, students who have already graduated but are coming back for more study, will soon exceed the number of students coming directly from high school. Thus at the University of British Columbia in Canada, the mean age of all its graduates students is now 31, and more than one-third of all students are over 24 years old. There is also an increase in students transferring from two-year colleges to universities – and vice versa. For instance, in Canada, at the British Columbia Institute of Technology more than 20 percent of its new enrolments each year already have a university degree.