ABSTRACT
In the last twenty years, adult higher education and the broader platform of lifelong learning in the USA has evolved into a blurred landscape of innovation and competition, as well as perplexing contractions and realignments. Adult higher education, for this chapter, refers to post-secondary credit and non-credit education serving adult students, typically identified as individuals who are 25 years of age or older. Within the United States, the term lifelong learning, “has not been as strongly embraced … particularly in the policy arena, as represented by the unfunded Lifelong Learning Act of 1976” (Kasworm, Rose and Ross-Gordon 2010: 7–8). Thus, lifelong learning, in US scholarly and professional discussions refers to those activities and engagements representing lifespan learning beyond compulsory schooling. While OECD countries and other nations with centralized governmental planning have considered lifelong learning in higher education through policy and potential funding supports, US states and the federal governments have ignored policy for lifelong learning. Further, policy for American higher education is decentralized, with its state leaders orchestrating issues of funding and broad constitution-based frameworks, and federal government offering leverage through select policies to those institutions which accept federal funding through specialized programs or financial aid student support. The base of policy development and key practices are promulgated through individual institutions, their systems, and their accreditation agencies. Thus, policy development in American higher education has been characterized as a continuum from a sophisticated multi-player chess game to a backyard sparring match among adolescents (Cook 2011; Nye 2004). With over 4,000 higher education institutions based in different histories, missions, and fiscal viability, this diversity has offered a complexity difficult to rationally capture, much less to explain in meaningful pictures, key trends and current impacts for an international audience. Thus, American adult higher education is highly diffuse in character and often more subject to institutional change than to state or federal policies.
