Since World War II, earning a college degree has gone from an elite privilege limited to fewer than 5 percent of the population to a broadly distributed achievement open to all. More than 25 percent of people over the age of twenty-five now have four-year degrees or higher. Our society values the credential highly as a sign of mastery and sustained performance. Dissent from this view arises occasionally, but no decline of eagerness to earn degrees is in sight. A major change during the same period has been the large number of adult learners engaged in higher education. Many are catching up after previous choices to delay their study. Others are discovering their degree interest for the first time, or they realize from their life experiences the value of going on to second or even third degrees to fulfill their aspirations. By the mid-1990s, persons over age twenty-five constituted almost 44 percent of higher education enrollments. If the criteria of adulthood were broadened beyond age alone to include younger persons whose lives include adult characteristics, the proportion of adults rose to well over 50 percent. The opportunity for many of these persons to study arises from recent innovations that make degrees more feasible for them. It is fair to call this an adult degree revolution.

of a Return of Prisoners coming under the Cognizance of the Police of Newcastle upon Tyne during the ten months from the 2nd of October 1837

No abstract

Augustus Hardin Beaumont is known as a secondary figure of English radicalism during the 1830s. He came to England from Jamaica in the spring of 1835 and by the end of January 1838 he was dead. He was briefly associated with the London Working Men's Association in its early stages and then went to the Northeast where he founded the Northern Liberator. Historians of Chartism have noted him in passing and they have recognized his almost frenzied militancy in support of democratic reform. Most agree with Francis Place's judgment that “his eccentricities sometimes bordered upon insanity”, but beyond that they tell us little more about him.