Never mind that his statistics and methods class had ended more than an hour earlier. Mark Mosley had some questions about the day’s assignment, and he wasn’t leaving until he understood the formulas he’d been taught. The picture of concentration, Mosley absorbed his instructor’s every word, interrupting only to make the inquiries that stretched the private tutorial to more than an hour.

“When you’re paying a thousand dollars for a class, you don’t have time to waste,” Mosley said when the brainstorming session finally ended. “And I don’t want a ‘B,’ I want an ‘A.’”

Mark Mosley knows a thing or two about hanging around long enough to get what he wants. Technically, Mosley is a senior at Martin University in Indianapolis. But that class designation comes with an asterisk: 2005 marks Mosley’s 25th year as a college student.

Mosley has spent 20 of those years at Martin, founded in 1977 by its current and only president, the Rev. Father Boniface Hardin. Hardin, a Catholic monk, long dreamed of an institution that would offer an affordable liberal arts education to minority, nontraditional students. Martin is the realization of that dream. Today, 81 percent of Martin’s 1,300 students come from the surrounding urban neighborhoods. Their tuition is $380 per credit hour — $5,700 per semester for a full load of classes. By comparison, the 2005-06 tuition at Indiana University at Bloomington, the state’s public flagship institution, is more than $7,000 per semester.

“We are here to help the unwanted and the put-down,” said Hardin. “Whoever walks through that door is part of the Martin family.”

Martin University is higher education stripped of pretension. The school’s total operating budget, $6.7 million, is smaller than that of a single academic department at many larger institutions. The university’s faculty totals 33. The campus is tucked into a light-industrial northeast-side neighborhood dotted with auto repair shops. Visitors and students enter campus, not through a stately gate, but between two simple computer-generated signs bearing the school’s name at the intersection of Sherman Drive and 22nd Street.

Mark Mosley can’t imagine a better learning environment. Even at a college that focuses on nontraditional students, he stands out. First of all, he’s male — on a campus where women outnumber men three to one. Second, at age 48, he’s eight years older than the average Martin student. Although he is fulfilling a prophecy — his mother worried aloud that he would spend his entire adulthood in college — Mosley didn’t enter higher education with the objective of becoming the poster child for lifelong learning. He was intent, however, on earning a degree without incurring thousands of dollars in student loan debt.

“Money is the total reason I’ve been in school this long,” he said. “If I’d been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, I’d have two or three doctorates by now.”

Mosley’s first stop out of high school was Butler University, a private and relatively selective liberal arts institution six miles north of the Martin campus. He said he lasted there about 18 months before the money ran out. That prompted a brief transfer to Marian College, a small Franciscan liberal arts school on Indianapolis’ northwest side. Lack of funds also cut short that stay, and Mosley entered the workforce for a few years before finding his way to Martin in 1985.

Since arriving at Martin, Mosley has done whatever is necessary to obtain a college degree, even if it’s meant taking one class at a time — as he often has done. He’s sold his “special Southern-fried chicken” at neighborhood barbeques, washed cars, cut grass, tutored high school students, helped Martin transform a convent into classrooms and received financial grants from the school. “When one door is shut, you just find another door,” he said. A performer of sacred and Christian music, Mosley has even bartered with a local church that agreed to pay part of his tuition in exchange for his musical talent during Sunday services.

“Any means that it takes to pay for tuition, I’ll do it,” he said. “How would it benefit me to be $50,000 in debt when I graduate from college when the job I get will only pay about $30,000 a year? I wouldn’t make enough to pay my loan; it doesn’t make any sense.”

The academic side of Mosley’s education has been eclectic at best. He has, over the years, taken nearly every class that Martin offers. On schedule to graduate next year, he’ll receive his bachelor’s degree in liberal arts. Despite his best intentions, Mosley figures he’ll emerge from Martin owing approximately $3,000 in loans.

After a quarter-century in the classroom, Mosley is considering several post-commencement options, including teaching music, substance abuse counseling and business management.

Nor has he ruled out postgraduate work, Mosley admits with a smile — even though that decision would probably fulfill his mother’s prophecy.

Steve Giegerich, former education writer for the Associated Press, teaches journalism at Columbia University.