With many older people returning to school to continue their education, the question has arisen as to whether they possess deficient study skills and whether study skills training is essential for older students to succeed in college. According to the College Board, 45 percent of all college students are 25 years of age or older, and only about 20 percent of college students are full-time and under 22 years of age (Culross, 1996). Adult students are represented in all sectors of higher education from the community college to the research university, says Culross. Many adult students completed high school at a time before universities instituted admission requirements. Also, Culross points out, women were often discouraged from taking math and other @hard@ courses in high school and from attending college. In today=s job market, workers are often required to have a college degree, and also often need to be computer literate, and possess advanced math skills and competency in oral and written communications.
Some adult students lack the required reading, writing, and math skills required for enrollment in some college-level courses, either because they failed to take them in high-school, or because the courses they took are no longer sufficient and they need to take Amake up@ courses to prepare them for today=s college curriculums (Culross, 1996). It is not so much that the adult students do not have adequate study skills, but that they have not taken the prerequisite courses for today=s college courses because of changes in course materials and previous attitudes to education. Richardson and King (1998) acknowledge that adult students taken together do embrace a disproportionate number of women and minorities, who traditionally have a harder time in college, but do not believe that as a whole they lack the skills to succeed (p. 68).
There has been some discussion in the literature regarding the intellectual ability of ol...