A University of Wisconsin System goal to see more college grads is targeting older adults instead of high school students. Danielle Kaeding reports.

In a visit to UW-Superior, UW-System President Kevin Reilly unveiled a program that will work to help working adults get back in the classroom. Reilly says the Adult Student Initiative is an effort to make school more affordable and provide more jobs in the state. “We have not done a good job in the university by and large in working with adult students helping them to get on to a baccalaureate degree. We did a little survey work recently that showed that there are something like a million people in Wisconsin that have some college credit but not a degree. Something like sixty thousand of them are saying, ‘We really want to go back into a degree program now. We know we’re going to need to have that degree for our own future, and we need some help in order to do that.” Reilly says responsibilities and the real world often get in the way of some adults pursuing secondary education. “These are people who can’t say, ‘Okay, I’m going to quit my job, leave my partner, leave my spouse, abandon my kids for two years and come to the campus and move into a dorm and study and I’ll see you in two years.’ That’s not going to work if that’s what we offer them.” Reilly says in the last ten years the UW-System dropped 10,000 adult students because pinching pennies in the budget often means more money goes toward high school students entering college. Reilly says more needs to be done for older folks going back to school.

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