Working Adults are Today’s Community College Students

The profile of college students in the minds of policy-makers today is an eighteen year old who lives at home and is going to school full time. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. Community college students (and university students as well) are older, often with dependents, and going to school part time while they are working. Unfortunately, policy-makers have designed tuition and financial aid around the needs of single, recent high school graduates. 

The median age of Seattle Community Colleges students is almost 30.  Almost a fifth are immigrants, over 30% have dependents, a quarter are working full time and well over half are working part time or more.  A majority are students of color. For the entire post-secondary system in Washington State, almost 40% of the students are over the age of 30. Two-thirds of the students who entered college at age 25 or older are low income.[1] In Seattle, only 5% of community college students have entered directly from high school. 

Demographics	Seattle Central	Seattle North	Seattle South	Seattle Vocational Institute	Washington State Community Colleges
Immigrants or refugees	18.5%	8.6%	9.3%	17.5%	8.4%
Single with Children	7.0%	7.0%	11%	27%	11%
Couples with Children	12%	23%	23%	9%	19%
Work Full time	18%	29%	29%	7%	17%
Work Part Time	26%	26%	20%	13%	26%
Median age	27	29	29	29	26
Over age 30					37%
Students of Color	55%	39%	52%	83%	36.3%
Source: Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, Data Warehouse, 2011

However,  college programs and financial aid are not designed to meet the needs of today's students.   Adult friendly evening and weekend schedules exist at many colleges but are significantly less common than traditional school schedules. Child care is rarely provided on campus and financial aid programs are geared towards traditional college registration schedules. 

Most importantly,  these workers will still be a majority of the workforce for the next quarter century yet many lack the skills to compete. [2]  If our goal is to succeed in global competition over the next decade, we need to begin thinking about how to retool our college system to meet the needs of the workforce. 

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[1] Prince and Jenkins, April 2005, Building Pathways to Success for Low-Skill Adult students, CCRC Brief,

[2] Thanks to Robert Baker, Economist, Division of Forecasting, and Washington Office of Financial Management for help in calculating labor participation and population data...