Data gathered from a national survey on the status of adult and continuing education in the United States are presented. Chapters cover: continuing education in 410 institutions of higher education (description of the sample, relationships among institutional characteristics, staffing patterns, and support for grants acquisition); the continuing education deanship (personal backgrounds of the deans, job structure, evaluation of the deans, faculty advisory committees, what deans do on the job, satisfactions and frustrations of the deans, and careers, institutions, and futures); teaching and teachers (funding for excellence, tenure, merit salary increases, the dean's teaching revisited, and teaching and unionization); and program quality in continuing education: the dean's perspective (program quality and program evaluation, the dean's impact on quality, and resource allocation). Among the conclusions are that: one in five institutions has the dean as the sole continuing education professional administrator; graduate degrees earned by continuing education deans include doctorates (70%) and other advanced degrees (3%); 54% of the deans experience an annual evaluation; the most general satisfaction for the deans is meeting community and student needs for programs; just over 50% of the chief academic officers in continuing education report teaching at least one course per year; teaching is the most important factor in tenure decisions for faculty working in continuing education; and teaching quality is the factor most frequently reported as very important in the dean's assessment of continuing education. (SM)