That was one of the key takeaways from a panel discussion on free community college plans Thursday during the Education Commission of the States’ “National Forum on Education Policy,” which drew 580 attendees, including state lawmakers and state higher education officials.
While the federal government and half of all states have adopted postsecondary degree attainment goals, policymakers must make sure those goals include adult learners, said Jesse O’Connell, strategy officer at the Lumina Foundation, an Indianapolis-based nonprofit that focuses on increasing the number of Americans with postsecondary credentials that lead to work.
“While it’s important to think about our K-12 pipeline, we’re not going to get there by making the K-12 pipeline maximally efficient alone,” O’Connell said. “We need to think about adults.
“The system as we currently have it designed may not be thinking about the needs that adults have or the barriers that adults face.”
The way many free community college plans are crafted now, they include criteria that exclude people in the 26 to 64 age bracket, said Sarah Pingel, policy analyst for the Education Commission of the States, or ECS.
For instance, she said, some of the plans include minimal high school GPAs or meeting certain FAFSA deadlines, which all signal an emphasis on more traditional students to the exclusion of adults.
