Continuing Education: Market Driven or Student Centered? :: School Education Learning Essays

Continuing Education: Market Driven or Student Centered? One enduring controversy in continuing education is whether programs should be market driven. The controversy has some connection with the pervasive image of the marginality of continuing education in higher education as well as the concept that continuing education programs must be self-sustaining. As Edelson (1991) says, "This principle of having to pay its own way is the single most distinguishing feature of American continuing education today" (p. 19), adding that adult education is the most blatantly market-driven segment of education. At the heart of the controversy is the issue of whether "market driven" is necessarily antithetical to the principles and philosophy of adult learning. This publication looks at whether this is a misconception or a reality. The Case against Market Driven According to Beder (1992), successful market-driven programs must have "sufficient numbers of voluntary adult learners who are motivated to exchange enough of their time and money to yield the clients and fee income" needed to operate programs (p. 70). This need to target areas of high demand leads to what Beder sees as the primary problems of market-driven systems: (1) they perpetuate inequality by neglecting the needs of those less able to pay; (2) they may meet individual needs efficiently but not overarching social needs; and (3) they often displace educational benefit with profit as an overriding goal. Rittenburg (1984) agrees that the demands of the marketplace are not a sufficient foundation for continuing education: "The nature of aesthetic and ideological products is such that production to meet consumer demand is not an adequate framework" (p. 22) because such products have intrinsic value. Controversy over a market orientation for adult education programs is not a new issue. Edelson (1991) reviews the history of the Ford Foundation/Fund for Adult Education's Test Cities Project (1951-61), which sought to demonstrate that noncredit liberal adult education could and should pay for itself. Over time, this obsession with economic viability led to the sacrifice of small-group discussion forums to the need for economies of scale and formats that produced higher revenues (such as large lectures). The controversy crosses many fields. In social work, Laufer and Shannon (1993) describe how program quality, which requires long-term investment in lieu of short-term profit, can suffer when programs must pay as they go. They argue that quality should be "the bottom line below the bottom line" (p.