The popular stereotype of the university student is a young person. But a minority of students are older men and women who have come to university after a period of employment and not direct from school. Possibly the proportion of mature students may increase in the years ahead, and one university, the Open University, caters especially for these older students. In our studies of success and failure in Aberdeen University over the past eight years, we have tended to exclude the mature students from the analyses, to make a homogeneous sample from a population defined as students coming straight from school to university. The problems of a mature student, coming to university after an interval away from study, may be different from those of the youth fresh from school. There is a popular stereotype of the mature student: oldish (anyone over 30 is old), a late developer who missed his chance by leaving school early or failing his eleven plus, seldom a high-flier, rather pedestrian and dull, conscientious, serious and struggling. A survey in December 1970 of 177 mature students who entered on courses in Arts or Science in Aberdeen University between 1965 and 1967 shows how wrong this stereotype is.
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