ill, the principal focus of attention in this research is not on postsecondary academic learning such as is available at two and four year colleges and universities as part of a continuous, full time education track. Rather, the focus is on the kind of continuing education undertaken by adults who have completed more or less standard academic studies and who may enroll in various courses on a part time, ad hoc, professional development, or otherwise informal basis.
There is a good deal of documentation of the expanding limits of adult education during the most recent twenty years of the twentieth century. In part, it has changed right along with the dramatic changes that so mark the twentieth century off from all previous ones. One index of this change, Cross explains, is the emergence of the middle aged adult population as the dominant demographic group, not least because of the so called baby boom segment born between 1945 and 1960 has begun to age and because of the baby "bust" decline in birth rates in the years just after 1
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