The lack of information about the experiences of mature-age male students is perplexing. Interest in the experiences of students making the transition from school to university or to other forms of tertiary education has grown considerably over the last 20 years. In part, this interest has been prompted by the government policies designed to bring about a rapid expansion of the higher education sector. Governments in many developed nations have been intent on transforming higher education from an elite system in which 5–10 per cent of the relevant age cohort is enrolled in an undergraduate degree, to a universal system in which more than 50 per cent of potential applicants are enrolled in the expectation that increasing the number of graduates will increase economic productivity and prosperity (Trow, 2010). Australia and the UK have set ambitious targets in this respect. In Australia, the Review of Australian Higher Education, better known as the Bradley Review, set a target of 40 per cent of young people to attain a minimum of a bachelor-level qualification by 2020 (Bradley, Noonan, Nugent, & Scales, 2008). The review was particularly concerned with the educational future of ‘those disadvantaged by the circumstances of their birth: Indigenous people, people with low socio-economic status, and those from regional and remote areas’ (Bradley et al., 2008, p. xi). In England, the Labour party’s Blair government set a goal of 50 per cent participation in higher education for all 18–30-year-olds by 2010 stating that ‘education must be a force for opportunity and social justice, not the entrenchment of privilege.’ (HEFCE, 2002). Both policies made explicit reference to mature-age students as under-represented and identified them among the people who should be encouraged to enrol. The twin and, to some extent, competing aims of increasing opportunities to participate in higher education (as underpinned by values around social justice) and the importance ascribed to higher education as contributing to a nation’s knowledge economy (signifying a more utilitarian and human capital approach) have been key motivations underpinning the access and widening participation policy agenda in both countries.
Given these drivers and the resulting changes in the policy context for higher education in the UK and Australia, there has been a move to open up higher education and move away from attracting only those applicants who were once described as ‘traditional students’ (Anderson & Vervoorn, 1983). Historically, traditional students were those coming from white, upper-middle and middle-class backgrounds, usually educated at private schools, aged 17–19 when embarking on university study, and more often than not, male. Somewhat wryly, Anderson and Vervoorn (1983) described the traditional Australian student of the 1960s and early 1970s as
the son of a doctor, lawyer or someone else with a house in St Ives or Kew. Because his parents wanted him to have the best education money could buy, they sent him to a private school, to study academic subjects and learn the importance of not getting his hands dirty. He went direct from school to college, avoiding the real world en route except for glimpses through the windscreen of the sports car his parents bought him. After a few years, he too becomes a doctor or a lawyer, and so begins to accumulate the money necessary to build a house larger than his father’s and to send his children to university. (p. 1)
By the 1980s, the focus shifted to the recruitment of students under-represented within the existing undergraduate population: women, students from other culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, students with disabilities, students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds and mature-age students. In Australia, under-represented students also included Indigenous students (Gale & Parker, 2013).
One consequence of these changes in enrolment patterns has been an increase in research into the experiences of students from diverse backgrounds, including mature-age students, for example McGivney (1996), Osborne (2003b), Waller (2005), O’Shea and Stone (2011) and Long and Townsend (2013). Despite the work that has been done here, there are significant gaps in our knowledge. Some of the missing knowledge concerns the experiences of mature-age male students. Their voices are largely unheard in discussions about widening participation and increasing equity.
We know very little about the motivations and aspirations that prompt mature-age men to enrol in university studies, or about what happens to them as students. There has been little attempt to investigate the specific experiences of mature-age male students, with some notable exceptions—Veronica McGivney’s (1999) Excluded Men: Men Who Are Missing from Education and Training; Penny Burke’s (2006) Men Accessing Education: Gendered Aspirations; and Berry et al.’s (2011) Male Access and Success in Higher Education. Yet enrolment data suggests that some men, in particular men from low socioeconomic and ethnic minority backgrounds, continue to be under-represented in higher education and at risk of becoming marginalised in the new knowledge-based, globalised economy. In the UK, educationalists have begun to monitor and investigate men’s access to, and participation in, higher education (Crawford & Greaves, 2015; Thompson & Bekhradnia, 2009), largely due to signs that this under-representation and decline is a continuing trend that has significant social consequences (Berry et al., 2011). Research over the last decade indicates that men from white, working-class backgrounds and culturally and linguistically diverse communities are the least likely to enter higher education and among the most likely to experience difficulty in making a successful transition to university study (BIS, 2015; Devlin, 2011; Higher Education Academy and Equality Challenge Unit, 2008; Kirby & Cullinane, 2016; Stevenson & Whelan, 2013).
In contrast, there is a large body of literature, which dates back over 30 years documenting gender segregation and the barriers to women’s access to higher education (Barone, 2011; Charles & Bradley, 2002; Jacobs, 1996; Moore, 1987; Stone & O’Shea, 2012). Some studies, for example, Lynch and O’Riordan (1998), Archer and Hutchings (2000), Reay (2003), Reay, Crozier, and Clayton (2010), and O’Shea and Stone (2011), have focused specifically on the inter-connections between gender and class or socioeconomic status to examine the experiences of working-class women, while other research has looked at the impact of violence on women’s participation in education (Stalker, 2001; Wagner & Magnusson, 2005; Daniels, 2010). The experiences of women enrolling in university degrees for the first time as mature-age students have appeared in much of this work, either as an aspect of women’s lived experience, or as a topic for investigation in its own right (Redding & Dowling, 1992). It is not our contention that research into the experiences of mature-age women has been exhausted. Nor are we arguing that no further research needs to be undertaken into the experiences of women returning to study. In fact, much of our interest in the experiences of mature-age male students comes from our own work with mature-age female students, and we are interested in comparing and contrasting their experiences with those of men. We understand that although men are in a minority in higher education, they are not necessarily a disadvantaged minority (Berry et al., 2011). Nevertheless, there is a case for examining the experiences of mature-age male students who have made the journey into higher education. Where researchers have attempted to examine the experiences of both female and male mature-age students, the results have sometimes been skewed towards female students simply because male students appear to have been reluctant to offer their own experiences (Sax, Gilmartin, & Bryant, 2003). The result of our interest in the experiences of mature-age students who were largely invisible was a study focusing solely on men.
Another challenge facing researchers interested in the fortunes of mature-age students of either gender is the lack of a precise definition of the term in government and university policies. ‘Mature-age’ students may be defined as those who are more than 20 years of age, more than 22 years of age, or alternatively those who completed their secondary schooling at least three years prior to enrolling at university. Kahu (2014) defines mature-age students as those over 25 years of age in their first year of enrolment, pointing out that many, if not most, school leavers will turn 21 while at university. Thompson and Bekhradnia (2009) note that changes in the methodology used to calculate the Higher Education Initial Participation Rate (HEIPR) have created uncertainty over the numbers of mature-age students enrolling for the first time. In order to include as wide a range of responses and experiences as possible, this study has opted to use the lowest age limit of 20 years; however, we are mindful of the distinction between younger mature-age students (20–40 years) and older mature-age (40+ years) (Findsen & McEwen, 2012; Mallman & Lee, 2014) and refer to the men in our study using these terms throughout the book.
Some Findings from International Research
While two universities in Australia and the UK are the primary focus of our research, the experiences of mature-age male students in other parts of the world also merit investigation. It appears that this topic has not attracted the same level of interest in many European countries, and it is not regarded as relevant in many less-developed countries where male students outnumber female, and women continue to have difficulty accessing university education (Morley, Le...