Adult learners always have been a part of the fabric of American higher education, although policy discussions up until recently have primarily centered around the needs of students who are just leaving high school. Thomas Edison State University, one of New Jersey’s 11 public universities and colleges, is one of the few schools designed specifically to serve that student population.
For 35 years, TESU has been led by Dr. George A. Pruitt. After a long and distinguished career, Pruitt recently announced his plans to retire. He will take a year-long sabbatical before returning to the institution as a distinguished fellow at Thomas Edison’s John S. Watson School of Public and Continuing Studies.
“I think society is going through a reset that is going to require it to rethink how it looks at college and higher education. It already has, it just hasn’t caught up with it in terms of the public discussion,” Pruitt told Diverse in a phone interview last week. “People still refer to adults as ‘non-traditional’ students, but the fact of the matter is they have been the majority of students in American higher education for the last 20 or 25 years.”
TESU, however, has always focused on the needs of the so-called “non-traditional” student.
At the time of Pruitt’s arrival in 1982, TESU served 3,000 students out of one historic building, modeled after a Florentine palazzo, in downtown Trenton, New Jersey. Today, TESU serves more than 17,000 students and has since dramatically expanded its footprint in the city, restoring several more historic buildings in the process.
TESU offers its students online programming, one of the largest nursing programs in the state of New Jersey, and a robust complement of 17 graduate programs and a doctoral program. To better serve its students, the school was quick to adopt new innovations and technologies as they emerged.
“When I got here, there were no computers at this institution. We had some word processors and IBM Selectric typewriters,” Pruitt said. “[But] when the technology became available in the mid to late ‘80s to use that technology to knock down access barriers to adult students, we embraced it dramatically.’
