Continuing Education: Market Driven or Student Centered? :: School Education Learning Essays

Continuing Education Market Driven or bookman Centered? One enduring controversy in continuing gentility is whether programs should be merchandise driven. The controversy has some connection with the pervasive symbol of the marginality of continuing education in higher education as comfortably as the concept that continuing education programs must be self-sustaining. As Edelson (1991) says, This principle of having to pay its own way is the single close to distinguishing indication of American continuing education today (p. 19), adding that big education is the most blatantly market-driven segment of education. At the heart of the controversy is the issue of whether market driven is necessarily antithetical to the principles and philosophy of adult learning. This publication looks at whether this is a misconception or a reality. The Case against Market Driven gibe to Beder (1992), successful market-driven programs must have sufficient numbers of voluntary adult learners who a re motivated to exchange enough of their time and money to yield the clients and fee income needed to operate programs (p. 70). This need to target areas of high make leads to what Beder sees as the primary problems of market-driven systems (1) they perpetuate ine spirit by neglecting the needs of those little able to pay (2) they may meet individual needs efficiently but non overarching affable needs and (3) they often displace educational benefit with profit as an overriding goal. Rittenburg (1984) agrees that the demands of the marketplace are not a sufficient foundation for continuing education The nature of esthetical and ideological products is such that production to meet consumer demand is not an fitting framework (p. 22) because such products have intrinsic value. Controversy over a market orientation for adult education programs is not a unseasoned issue. Edelson (1991) reviews the history of the Ford Foundation/Fund for Adult Educations Test Cities confound (195 1-61), which sought to demonstrate that noncredit liberal adult education could and should pay for itself. everyplace time, this obsession with economic viability led to the sacrifice of small-group discussion forums to the need for economies of cuticle and formats that produced higher revenues (such as large lectures). The controversy crosses many fields. In social work, Laufer and Shannon (1993) describe how program quality, which requires long-term investment in lieu of short profit, can suffer when programs must pay as they go. They argue that quality should be the bottom line below the bottom line (p.