“You’re a Mature Student and You’re a Tiny, Tiny Little Fish in a Big Massive Pond of Students”: A Thematic Analysis Investigating the Institutional Support Needs of Partnered Mature Students in Postsecondary Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mature students in postsecondary education—those over 25 years of age, also known as nontraditional students or adult learners—make up a significant minority population on Canadian postsecondary campuses. Despite academic performance that tends to be higher than that of traditional students, the retention of mature students is lower due to the stressors they face in their home and school roles. This paper examines the insights of mature students and their intimate partners on how higher education institutions can provide better supports to make postsecondary programs and campuses more accessible to adult learners and enable their success. A sample of 25 mature postsecondary students enrolled in Canadian higher education institutions and their partners participated in dyadic interviews that explored the connections between their relationship and school experiences. A data-driven, inductive thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews found three themes that focused on the institutional support needs of partnered mature students, highlighting the need to (1) increase institutional knowledge and awareness of mature students’ needs, (2) offer flexible study options to complete courses and program requirements, and (3) provide relevant supports and programs. Mature students felt marginalized at their institutions related to the programs, instructors, staff, resources, and supports that are strongly focused on traditional-aged and circumstanced students. Recommendations are provided for higher education institutions to provide resources and supports that meet mature students’ unique needs to both access and be successful in their pursuit of postsecondary education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".