Colleen Leontovich admits that one of the best things she's ever done was make the decision to go back to college.

“I just feel like there's not really anything that I can't do whereas before I thought I couldn't accomplish anything,” she said.

After a near 25-year gap, Leontovich, 43, of Auburn, returned as a student to Cayuga Community College in 2005 and is now three semesters away from obtaining an associate degree in business administration. And she's not stopping there. She intends to pursue a bachelor's degree and aspires to work in human resource management.

“I have home-schooled my children for the last nine years, and I've come to the point where I realize how important a good education is,” she said. “This year my daughter was starting to look at college, and I didn't feel that I had the right to tell her how important college was when I didn't bother to finish.”

When Leontovich graduated high school she followed the traditional path from high school to college. She enrolled at CCC when she was 18, but failed.

She has been working at Bass Pro Shops in the Fingerlakes Mall since it opened in 2004. At one point she submitted an application for a higher position, but later withdrew it. She said she lacked the confidence to pursue the promotion and believed she was unqualified because she didn't have a degree behind her.

“Although I had the talent, I didn't have the education behind me and a lot of employers look at that - ‘OK, does she have what it takes to finish a project,'” she said. “If you don't have that behind you, going to school for two years and being able to graduate, they really question if you have that ability.”

Leontovich maintains a 3.5 grade point average and is president of Phi Theta Kappa, the honors program for community colleges.

Leontovich is not the only adult either returning to school or pursing higher education for the first time. Rather, she represents a growing number of adults who have realized the importance of a college education, and local higher education institutions are making sure their needs are addressed.

“I truly believe that all women and every person should be the best they can be, and that is truly what we want to do,” said Ron Young, director of transfer admissions at Wells College. “We saw adult women see a need to better their skills and have the desire to learn. And the same goes for adult men.”

Oftentimes those people want to sit in a classroom, he said.

There are about 40 adults at Wells, campus this year. Many are transfer students, coming in as sophomores and juniors, but there are some that join the college community as first-years.

And they learn, side by side, with the younger generation. In some cases, Young said, mothers are sitting with their children in classrooms.

For Janet Nelson, director of adult education at CCC, inter-generational classrooms can provide lively discussions, mutual respect and an exchange of life experiences, as was the case in one of the accelerated Sunday classes CCC offers for continuing education.

This particular class, Nelson said, has a greater number of traditional age students #- those entering college directly from high school #- than non-traditional age students #- adults over the age of 25.

The professor had approached Nelson, saying that he was nervous about how well they could interact and learn together.

Two weeks later, Nelson said, he returned and said, “You should hear the conversations. (The adults) seem to have the excitement the traditional students have.”

Many adults fear returning to school because they do not know if, after being out of school for so long, they can actually succeed in college and or keep up with their younger counterparts, Nelson said.

Adults going to school and “meeting people like them takes the fear of not being able to function with the younger learners,” she said.

Nelson is heavily promoting adult education, and as more adults return to the classroom, this fear will become a confidence that can be shared with their peers.

“I think we are at a moment of opportunity, energy and momentum to connect to adult students. As more adult students share plans and goals with other adults, it encourages and gives confidence to other adults to do that same thing,” Nelson said.

Young finds that many of his adult students graduate Wells feeling fulfilled, that they are ready to tackle anything.

One of his former students sent him an e-mail recently in which she told him how she feels now that she's received an education.

“She felt like a fish that was finally thrown back in the lake,” he said. “She could swim.”