THERE has been a great amount of hoopla lately about the adult student, who has come to be seen as the demographic nostrum to cure us all of bank ruptcy and despair. To date, the primary response to this student has been a proliferation of continuing-education courses and an outcropping of weekend colleges and branch campuses popped down in libraries, banks, and even shopping cen ters. With a certain amount of cynicism, colleges have made available courses in personal psychol ogy, creative stitchery, and amateur weather fore casting, which tend to discredit the meaning of adult education; but only a few educators have seriously tried to determine whether adult learners differ from eighteento twenty-two-year-olds and, if so, in what ways. Are the older students simply post adolescents with bifocals and mortgages or a radi cally different group whose distinctive cognitive abilities, needs, learning styles, and academic goals represent a new challenge in higher education? I do not mean to suggest that there has been no research in the field. Building on the adult-devel opment studies of Erikson, Neugarten, Levinson, and others, Arthur Chickering at the Center for the Study of Higher Education in Memphis, Allen Tough at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and a number of people at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and else where throughout this country and Great Britain are making significant contributions toward under standing the adult student, the changes that occur in the process of maturing, and the implications for course and curriculum design. Still, in several im portant areas research has barely scratched the sur face. For example, those of us in English and mod ern languages may suspect that changing reading and writing habits or acquiring a new language is easier for adolescents than for older students, whose linguistic patterns are firmly entrenched, but the evi dence so far is scanty. And certainly, few of us outside departments of education have yet had the time or inclination to study what findings we do have and to adjust our teaching strategies accord ingly. The current data on the incidence and predilec-. tions of adult students fall into the categories of good news and bad news. The good news begins with the sheer numbers of potential students. In 1975 a National Institute of Education (NIE) study found about seventeen million adults engaged in continuing education of various kinds, a figure that we know has increased radically in the past five years. Even more encouraging, Allen Tough's data Lois Lamdin*