The question of how best to deliver education services to traditional students and working adults presents the issue of how well education is functioning to renew and improve the American labor force.

Forecasters, taking note of the constant changes in the workplace, coupled with emerging technologies, predict that by 2005, 20 million jobs in the United States will require different skills than are required today. In fact, advances in computing speed and capacity will accelerate beyond today’s two dimension silicon microchips to three-dimensional circuits created from microscopic particles. By 2010, $1000personal computers will operate 1000 times faster than the current high quality Intel Pentium III 650Mhz, with 128M of ram and 12.9G hard drive. There are, of course, bewildering arrays of other technological wonders in the world today.

Should workers expect higher education to equip them with training and skills that will be required by corporate America? Out of a sense of justice and to provide enough competent people to staff the work force, the higher education system must be open. It must not draw a line between the well-educated and the other half. All of societies’ members must be educated. All people, whatever their origin of wealth, must have access to higher education and through it, to upward mobility. More than ever, education will fuel our economy and shape our society.

To paraphrase James F. Carlin a past chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education in his seminal essay on Restoring Sanity to an Academic World Gone Mad, he states that college tuition is so high that the poor are frozen out in spite of expanded scholarship programs. Middle-class parents are having a difficult time meeting college expenses. They deplete their savings re-mortgage their homes, invade their 401(k) plans, and work two and three jobs to pay their children’s college bills. Estimates indicate that about half of graduates leave college with student loans that take years to pay off.

In their zeal to bring in dollars, colleges and universities admit students who can’t handle the course work but who may be able to pay the bills. When that happens, everyone suffers—especially the students. But rather than rejecting or expelling those who are ill prepared or lazy, college’s attempt to remediate them. They make many of their courses too easy, while grade inflation gets students through those that are more difficult. Rigorous core curricula have almost disappeared. Graduation requirements are quite relaxed."

Political correctness and diversity have taken priority in admissions decisions and in classrooms over experience in academic subjects. People are uncomfortable with politically correct behavior. They don’t realize it means just learning to speak in ways that enable us to work together. But colleges and universities tend to emphasize the differences in people rather than what they have in common. They keep adding programs and courses to an already bloated curricula in an attempt to be all things to all people.

There is some justification for taking the view that many undergraduate students in traditional universities who perform miserably do so because they are not in college to study. Instead, they see college as an inexpensive and convenient base camp from which to pursue their recreational agendas.

Unfortunately the most compelling image of the college student remains one of youths away from home for the first time, studying full-time on cloistered campuses, drinking beer, falling in love and preparing themselves to enter the working world of adulthood.

Consider the dilemma of the working adult returning to class. Instead of a student population of adolescents studying full time, over half of the 15 million college and university students in the United States are over twenty-five and 90% of them are employed, but colleges and universities have change little in response to this dramatic shift in the nature of the student population.

Among the fundamental changes needed in American Higher Education to accommodate the emergence of adult students is a commitment of establishing higher standards for student conduct, developing a stronger faculty engaged in personalized attention for student outcomes, and placing the utmost importance on teaching and learning.

The cornerstone of higher education’s philosophy should be the recognition of the distinction between the younger student still deciding on a career and the adult student who has established personal and professional goals. Education for working adults must harmonize with full personal and professional lives. There have been major strides among college’s, universities, and other groups who have implemented alternative degree-granting programs for adults. These programs allow mature students to benefit from the integration of work and school, with faculty comprised of working practitioners, experts in their field.

The student is pursuing a problem or activity by applying approaches he or she already knows and integrating those approaches with alternatives presented by other team members, research sources, or current experience. Through a structured curriculum, the student balances pre-existing views and approaches with new experiences to construct a new level of understanding. Learning is then assessed through performance-based projects as well as traditional paper and pencil testing.

The faculty is a facilitator or coach in the constructivist learning approach. The faculty guides the student, stimulating and provoking the student's critical thinking, analysis and synthesis throughout the learning

Meanwhile, the reality is that faculty members do even more meaningless research, while spending fewer and fewer hours in the classroom.