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Pre-Boomer Students On Campus: An Exploratory Study Of How Students Born Before 1946 Experience The Youth-Oriented Campus Culture At Unm, Elinor Sue Coates Phd

Organization, Information and Learning Sciences ETDs

Older learners have been studied thoroughly, except for those born before 1946, preceding the post-war "population bulge" (Carlson, 2008; Laditka, Fischer, Laditka, & Segal, 2004; Verstynen, 2011). Most such studies define "older" as over 25 or over 40, and fail to separate the subject group from those who came later. Defining a group by numerical age is problematic because it changes every year and soon omits the group's defining life experiences (Pilcher, 1994), which for this group include the Great Depression, World War II, the polio epidemic, and life before television. To address that gap this critical ethnography explored the …