By ELISSA NADWORNY and JULIE DEPENBROCK

But these days that narrative of the residential, collegiate experience is way off, says Alexandria Walton Radford, who heads up postsecondary education research at RTI International, a think tank in North Carolina. What we see on movie screens and news sites, she says, is skewed to match the perceptions of the elite: journalists, researchers, policymakers.
Today’s college student is decidedly nontraditional — and has been for a while. “This isn’t a new phenomenon,” Radford says. “We’ve been looking at this since 1996.”
So, what do we know about these “typical” college students of today?
Radford has done a lot of research on this and defines the nontraditional student as having one or more of the following characteristics:

