In the United States, the number of first-time college students over age 25 fell 15.5% from fall 2024 to fall 2025 [Inside Higher]. The drop followed four straight years of growth, including an 18.7% rise the year before, and the experts Inside Higher Ed interviewed differ on whether colleges should be worried.
The larger question is who takes part in adult learning at all. In OECD data, adults who did not finish upper secondary school are less than half as likely to take part in job-related training as adults with a tertiary degree [OECD]. The barriers in their way are practical ones: lost wages, fixed schedules, low confidence, and programs built for someone else. They fall hardest on the people who already have the least room to maneuver.
Who Gets Left Behind
Exclusion from adult learning is not random.
Photo by It clusters around a few predictable traits: low income, older age, limited prior schooling, and work that does not bend around a class schedule.
The education gradient is the clearest pattern. On average across OECD countries that measure participation over four weeks, 4% of adults aged 25 to 64 without upper secondary education take part in job-related training, compared with 6% of those who finished upper secondary school but hold no tertiary degree and 14% of those with a tertiary degree [OECD]. The OECD sums up the pattern as “learning begets learning.”
Age adds another layer. In the same OECD data, 10% of adults aged 25 to 54 take part in job-related training over four weeks, against 6% of those aged 55 to 64, a gap the OECD links in part to older adults leaving the labor force [OECD]. England’s figures measure something different, the age mix of people already enrolled. Of 1,174,940 adult learners in 2024/25, 22.9% were 50 or over, more than the 18.1% aged 19 to 24, and 59.0% were 25 to 49 [Explore].
Hourly and gig workers face a quieter form of exclusion. Most programs assume a learner can commit to fixed weekly hours. A worker juggling shifts cannot make that promise, so the door is effectively closed before cost ever enters the conversation.
The First Wall: Money and Time
For adults who already work, the cost of study and the time it takes are tied together.
Photo by Direct costs are the visible part: tuition, materials, transport. The harder cost is often invisible. Adults already in the workforce have to weigh the income they will lose while in school as well as the price of the course. [Inside Higher] A stipend covering fees does nothing for rent due at the end of a month with fewer worked hours.
Time is the second half of the wall. Caregiving and multiple jobs leave little surplus. The people with the least flexibility are often the same ones the education gradient already disadvantages.
Solving tuition alone leaves the rest of the wall standing.
Confidence and Program Design
Behind the logistics sits a barrier that is harder to measure: confidence.
Photo by Adults who had discouraging early school experiences often carry that doubt for decades. It can keep them away even after the money and time problems are solved.
Program design frequently makes this worse. Many adult courses copy the structures of school classrooms, which assume a learner with no competing obligations and no accumulated experience. That mismatch quietly filters out the people it should serve. The alternative is andragogy, a teaching approach built around self-directed, experience-based learning that treats adults as people who already know things.
Outreach is the last design failure. Eligible adults often never hear that an accessible program exists, because recruitment happens in places they do not visit. A course advertised only on a campus website will not reach a parent working two jobs.
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Negative early schooling leaves lasting self-doubt
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Classroom-style formats ignore adult experience and constraints
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Weak outreach means many never learn the option exists
What Programs Can Change
Three program features line up with the barriers described above. Colleges already use some of them: over the past several decades, community colleges and regional public universities have added support resources and more flexible course schedules for adults with jobs and children [Inside Higher].
Photo by - Flexible delivery. Asynchronous and evening options let working adults and caregivers fit study around fixed commitments rather than the reverse.
- Wraparound support. Childcare, transport help, and counseling deal with pressures that sit outside the coursework itself.
- Contextualized instruction. Building lessons around a learner’s actual job or goal replaces the school-classroom format described above.
None of these is exotic. The sources cited here do not measure how much any of them raises enrollment or completion.
The adults least likely to be in job-related training are the ones with the least schooling, and participation falls with age. [OECD] For adults who already work, the price of a course includes the income they give up while attending it [Inside Higher]. Flexible delivery, wraparound support, and contextualized teaching are each aimed at a specific barrier described here: fixed schedules, pressures outside the coursework, and courses built for someone else.
