If Dr Tom Collins had stuck to his first choice, he'd probably be practising as a country vet by now. Then again, he might have opted for organic farming instead. It was his guidance counsellor who made him think twice about his choice of career.

All Father Rubin Butler did was pose the simple question: "Do you think that science subjects are your strength?" and Collins was off. He cancelled his place in the veterinary college and sent in a last-minute application to Maynooth to study sociology. It was 1972, and after the confines of boarding school - St Flannan's, Ennis, Co Clare - the freedom of Maynooth and its engagement with ideas was wonderful. After college, the farmer's son from Silvermines, Co Tipperary, took a job with Macra na Feirme and it was there his interest in adult education began. Come 1979, with a master's on youth value systems from Maynooth and two years working in rural development for Teagasc under his belt, he was appointed to Maynooth's fledgling adult education department. He's been there ever since.

At this stage of his life - in case you didn't know it - Dr Tom Collins is a very big wheel in the world of adult education. As director of Maynooth's Centre for Adult and Community Education, he heads a department which caters for up to 2,500 students taking off-campus courses, 250 students on modular, part-time degree courses and 200 students taking professional training courses in adult education. On top of that, he's just spent the last two years working on the much-acclaimed green and white papers on adult education. It has been, he says, "a fantastic experience". "Adult education, in its current format, emerged in the late 1970s," he recalls, "with the appointment of the VEC adult education organisers. The Eighties saw the growth of the exuberant community education movement, driven largely by women's groups. They flourished in very deprived, low income areas and developed outside the formal education sector."

At the same time NUI Maynooth was developing courses and enabling people to obtain professional qualifications in adult education. "All the developments happened and grew organically in the 1980s and 1990s in an unplanned but innovative way," Collins says. "A critique began to be developed as to the nature of education and learning, which was quite different from the dominant, mainstream view of education. The green and white papers gave the opportunity to a generation of people involved in adult education to give expression to that learning and to distill the lessons of 20 years' growth. Both papers have attempted to stabilise, in an institutional way, the programmes that were developed over the years."

Traditionally, adult education at third level has been regarded as something peripheral, something to be tolerated, he says. Now, though, as a result of the green and white papers, it is moving centre stage. The third-level sector is being asked to make core strategic shifts in favour of mature students, he says. The impact will be enormous.

Changing demographics, Collins notes, mean that the universities are going to become more interested in attracting rather than deflecting applications - especially in less prestigious faculties and subjects. According to Collins, a major challenge for educators is to admit mature students to the more restrictive areas of third level - veterinary and medicine for example. Another challenge is the recruitment of adults from social groups that have traditionally suffered from poor representation in the higher education sector.

"Places should be specifically reserved for people from these groups," Collins says. It's nonsensical, he says, to train middle-class youngsters as teachers and then to send them out to work in areas where the culture is very different from their own. Far better that people from disadvantaged and minority groups are taught by people with similar cultural and social backgrounds. According to Collins, a new group of disadvantaged people has emerged. "The disadvantaged have moved out of the community and into the workplace," he says. In the 1990s, he worked with the unemployed, and women in the home, in community organisations in disadvantaged areas. As a result of the Celtic Tiger, however, the zone of disadvantage has moved into low income work. The disadvantaged are now people who are in low-income, low-skills jobs with no promotional prospects. The challenge for educators is to devise new ways of reaching this population.

For the future, Collins predicts that Maynooth will expand its training of adult educators to meet an increased demand for personnel trained to work with adults. Universities will become learning resource areas and along with on-campus teaching will use distance learning and e-learning methods and work more closely with employers than in the past. "A huge requirement for re-skilling in industry will involve new partnerships with companies and more flexible arrangements - where industry provides the work and the universities and ITs the training." However, new approaches, too, are required to solve "the learning-earning dilemma", he says. Teaching adults requires huge organisational change. "We can't limit our approach to adult education and expect people to come in at 24 and do the same things as if they were 18.

"We need adult-friendly programmes that are semesterised, modularised and based on experiential learning. When we talk of schools and change we always begin from the point of view of the teaching process. I think we need to begin with the learning process. We need new modes of assessment which deal with learning outcomes, rather than simply passing exams. Exams have a paralysing effect on people. I don't believe you should equate human potential with the capacity to cope with what for many people is a frightening experience."

New modes of assessment are vital, Collins argues. "We need to look at the range of social, intellectual and emotional attributes that are deemed to be desirable in the pursuit of a particular profession or occupation." Take medicine, for example. "You'd look at the criteria associated with being a doctor and you could put together a range of tests which would allow a person to demonstrate that he or she could meet that criteria. If people had learning deficits, they could be addressed."

There are thousands of people with extensive knowledge of and expertise in particular areas and no qualifications - local historians are a good example. "We should be able to find a mechanism for people to display their knowledge without having to sit an exam," he says.

It's a good time for adult education - both inside and outside Maynooth. The college is committed to appointing a chair of adult education; the State is giving due recognition. "Its moment has finally come."