ABSTRACT
Adults are now firmly on the higher education agenda in the United Kingdom for the first time since the immediate post-war period. Our higher education system’s love affair with the well qualified school-leaver began to pale in the late-1970s, when the likely effects of the downturn in the birthrate became apparent (Department of Education and Science, 1978). The increased recruitment of mature students was seen as one obvious way of maintaining student, and thus staff, numbers. The resulting expansion in the opportunities for adults to enter higher education has been reflected in a range of guides directed at them and their advisers (e.g. Bell, Hamilton and Roderick, 1986; Pates and Good, 1989; Rosier and Earnshaw, 1989).
