“Today’s college student is decidedly nontraditional — and has been for a while. “This isn’t a new phenomenon,” Radford says. “We’ve been looking at this since 1996.”…Radford has done a lot of research on this and defines the nontraditional student as having one or more of the following characteristics:
- Financially independent from their parents
- Having a child or other dependent
- Being a single caregiver
- Lacking a traditional high school diploma
- Delaying postsecondary enrollment
- Attending school part time
- Being employed full time…”
This article did make me question something. Why have the past generations changed so much compared to their/our parents. When my parents were in college they both worked part and full-time jobs while going to school, able to go out and party, be in a Greek life organization and be able to support themselves all at the same time. I honestly think it could tie into the first reading we had about millennials and why they are so lazy. But at the same time, these new nontraditional college students and the statistics posted in the reading really had me stumped. 1 in 5 is at least 30 years old. This took me totally by surprise. When my dad graduated college in the late 80’s early 90’s there were definitely not many people over 25 years old in a graduating class. In addition, one more thing that also shocked me was a quarter of students take a year off before starting school. I’m guessing that this is because of work maybe or something else I don’t know just something that made me question why they would do that instead of trying to graduate with your degree as soon as possible.