We need to let people study later in life. Ask my dad | Gaby Hinsliff

Not everyone knows what they want to do at 18. So why has the mature student become a dying breed?

This September, one of my oldest friends is going back to school. Three decades on from her last essay crisis, she’ll be back in the land of freshers’ pub crawls and student railcards, in pursuit of a new career that we didn’t even know existed in our 20s. And listening to her talk about summer reading lists, I am seized with an unexpectedly sharp stab of envy. Who doesn’t occasionally dream of turning back the clock and starting over? It should never be too late to experiment with something new, or to unwind decisions blindly made decades ago.

Yet mature students are an increasingly endangered species. A midlife career change like this is a luxury most people who work for a living can’t afford and it’s those who most need to retrain – men and women panicking that their jobs are disappearing from underneath them thanks to technological change, or those who messed up at school and only later came to regret it – who are most firmly stuck. When Philip Augar, the banker appointed by the government to lead a review of further and higher education in England, launched his findings this week, he included plans to resuscitate lifelong learning and was at pains to argue that education beyond 18 shouldn’t just be about teenagers going on to university. But the headlines, inevitably, were all about tuition fees.

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from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2KiwnZF