ABSTRACT
Participants continue to be middle-class, increasingly women more than men, mostly white, mostly employed, and mostly people who seem to be taking advantage of educational opportunities for career advance or continuing professional upgrading in an increasingly stratified job market. Survey research reveals a number of motives to be at work for most participants, even where the vocational motive is dominant. London, a sociologist by training, may have been the first researcher to note the independent effects of age and prior educational attainment on ‘participation in adult education’ (PAE). The effects of age and gender on PAE rates, schooling continues to be the dominant demographic influence on PAE. In 1969, those with less than four years of high school accounted for a substantial 44 per cent of the total adult population, but only IS per cent of participants in adult education.
