AAACE 2021 Annual Conference

Adult education policy; social risk; access; equity; education divide; economic dignity

Policy discourse is based on the assumption that educational outcomes are a result of individual choices, as opposed to other contextual or societal factors. This shifts the burden of achieving economic and social mobility onto the people who have the fewest resources, further distancing them from hopes of economic dignity.

Today, AWE policy is caught in the crosshairs of national economic and social policy discussions. Since 1998, policy discourse has been framed in instrumentalist and neoliberal terms that present AWE options in terms of "investment," "choice," and workforce driven aims. This shift ing educational policies away from a model of public, shared responsibility – or the management of wider social risk through collective pooling mechanisms to better distribute the individualized social costs – toward an individualization of risk burden. Such policies require individuals to take social, personal, and economic risks upon themselves and manage their own life-course risk factors. This framing may, in effect, generate more barriers to learning and social mobility. My presentation will address why it is imperative to consider how larger social risks are individualized through AWE policies. While well-intentioned, the bulk of the burden of achieving economic and social mobility is effectively displaced onto the people who have the fewest resources, further distancing them from hopes of economic dignity.