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Who are mature students?
Mature students are defined as those who are 21 years or older on the day they start their undergraduate degree. They may have been away from education for some time with work, family commitments or for personal reasons or are seeking a change of direction, a new career, or a new interest. Perhaps they ‘missed’ out on higher earlier on in their education journey but now feel ready to take their studies further.
There is no ‘typical’ mature student, and their backgrounds and experiences are incredibly diverse. Mature students can face a different journey to their peers and come via a slightly different route than non-mature students. UCL has mature students studying across all faculties in a variety of undergraduate programmes at the University.
Group descriptors and barriers
In 2017/2018, mature students made up a 13.3% of UK-domiciled undergraduate intake and this number has remained steady. They are more likely to be commuter students, disabled, from access backgrounds and have caring responsibilities as well as financial responsibilities.
Mature students have also reported challenges with:
- Identity and belonging
- Feeling isolated and disengaged from support
- Lack of study confidence
- Barriers to social and cultural capital
- Financial barriers
- Difficulties in accessing academic and wellbeing support.
Analysis of UCL data shows there is a non-significant attainment gap for mature students and a small but significant continuation gap for mature students compared to their younger peers.
As a result, UCL has committed to:
- Reduce mature and young student non-continuation rate by five percentage points by 2024-25
- Eliminate the non-continuation gap between young and mature students by 2030-31
Student Success Interventions
We will be running our first Mature Student Lunch to support this group in building networks and feeling confident in accessing UCL’s services.
We are also working on pre-arrival engagement, a named contact to help students navigate wellbeing and funding services to advertising events and opportunities for mature students. We are also working with the Student Union to promote networks for mature students.