All Grown Up & Back on Campus
Adults make up nearly half of all college students, and most of them are women.
September 17, 2007
By Hope Keller & Mary Medland
Photography By Bryan Burris
Debbie Harrison — wife, mother, employee, student — is set toreceive her bachelor’s degree in business management in May 2008
from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland.
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Debbie Harrison has worked since she was 15. Back then she had to support her mother and younger brother. After graduating from high school she started college, but it was too hard to manage both school and work. She quit school and kept working.
She grew up and got married — to a teacher. He pushed her to go back to college for an associate’s degree, which she received in 2002. And she continued working.
After that, says Harrison, 37, of Laurel, “I was just moseying along, going to work.” But her husband, Tommy, was not giving up. “He’d say, ‘Babe, you already have your associate’s degree; you should get your bachelor’s.”
But she resisted: “I said, ‘There’s no way I could go back to school.’” By that point she had a baby. And she was still working, by then as an executive assistant for Juice Energy Inc. in Washington, D.C.
Then Harrison heard a radio advertisement for the accelerated program at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. She was intrigued.
To make a not-as-long-as-she-expected story shorter, Harrison in 2005 started classes for a bachelor’s degree in business management, which she’s scheduled to receive in May. She plans to use her degree and new skills at Juice Energy, which devises greenhouse gas reduction strategies for commercial and industrial companies.
Harrison is determined not to be among the nation’s 54 million adults without a four-year college degree. (Of those, 34 percent have no college education at all.) She knows that education is the ticket to a more secure future, and she’s determined to provide that for her son, now 6.
“Where I grew up there was a cement park with broken glass and barbed wire,” she says of her early childhood in Philadelphia. “Coming home in the car with Mom, we would sit down really low on the floor to avoid gunfire.”
She remembers seeing her first mugging at 5. “That was the norm,” she says, but it is not and will not be the norm for her son. “That’s the past. I learned from it. I look at that and that’s not where I am now. I have a chance to show my son a better way. Going to college gives me a chance to be a role model for my son.”
Harrison goes to school year-round. Once or twice a week she makes the two-and-a-half-hour commute from her office in Washington to Notre Dame. “It’s not pretty,” she says of the trek, which involves taking three trains and then driving for an hour from the MARC station in Laurel, where she parks her car.
Her husband, who teaches high school French and Spanish in Prince George’s County, keeps her motivated. “He’s my biggest cheerleader,” Harrison says. The accelerated program’s team approach to learning also means her classmates are there to urge her on, and vice-versa, when things get tough. “You always have someone there to say, ‘Don’t give up on yourself,’” she says. “You really become a family.”
Notre Dame’s Accelerated College began in the fall of 2003 as an outgrowth of the Weekend College, which has offered undergraduate degree programs tailored to adults for more than 30 years.
Currently, Notre Dame’s accelerated program offers a BA in business, a BS in nursing for registered nurses who wish to upgrade their skills, and a BA in elementary education.
“The hallmark of the [accelerated] program is that it is transportable,” says Debbie Calhoun, chair of the Business and Economics Department. Notre Dame takes its courses to workplaces, as well as to extension sites in Arundel Mills, the HEAT Center in Harford County and the Laurel College Center in Prince George’s County. More accelerated students study off-campus than on the main campus in Baltimore.
Jane Dryden, a registered nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital, studies with Notre Dame professors who come to the hospital once a week for a four-hour class. “Good Sam’s administration has really pushed all of us to get our BS degrees,” says Dryden, 50.
Like Harrison and Dryden, many “nontraditional” — code word for “adult” — students start or go back to college to advance professionally.
In fact, adult students now account for nearly half of all college enrollments and most of these adult students are women, according to the American Association of University Women.
“Some of these women are very high up on their career path and have been told they cannot go any further without a bachelor’s degree, while others are hourly workers who wish to upgrade their earning potential,” Calhoun says, adding that 95 percent of adult students work full time and that most are between 25 and 50 years old.
Other adult students are gearing up to change careers, says Amalia Fried Honick, director of Goucher II, Goucher College’s program for adult undergraduates. “Goucher II has been around for 22 years and is targeted at students who are 24 years and older,” says Honick, who is also an assistant professor of political science and international relations. “We have even had people in their 60s and 70s. [The program] was intended to give those students a chance to begin college or to finish a college degree.”
Some students return to college because they just want the satisfaction of finally graduating.
Honick says the overwhelming majority of Goucher II students transfer from community colleges. “We do streamline the application process,” she says. “For example, we do not require SAT scores or a high school transcript if the student has completed at least 27 college credits. We look at these students a little differently, although their prior academic performance remains important. We’re interested in their life experiences, their essays and their letters of recommendation. And we want to be sure that Goucher is the right place for them.”
“Accelerated” does not mean easy, Honick emphasizes. The programs are challenging, and at Goucher, all students are required to complete an off-campus internship. “Internships are an integral part of the liberal arts philosophy,” Honick says. “Most of our students have some work experience, but they still love the internships. They are an opportunity to network with other people and to test their skills, and sometimes internships lead to job opportunities.”
Notre Dame’s Calhoun says about 72 percent of Accelerated College students complete the program in three years or less. Nationally, only 16.9 percent of part-time students graduate within four years.
Dryden speaks for many adults when she says that college has helped her far beyond the classroom. “I’ve met great people and have improved my self-confidence in many different areas,” she says. “And this has really renewed my enthusiasm for my profession.”
