Description: This paper focuses on the topic of adult learning in a broad sense, in the context of a changing society, where knowledge and learning have been having a key role - namely by the current designations of Knowledge Society, Lifelong Learning Society, and so on. The construction and transformation of knowledge seems to be no more exclusive of the universities or of any other educational formal systems. The construction of knowledge occurs in settings and contexts different than the formal ones, and can be framed by a perspective of lifelong and life wide learning. In recent years, informal and non-formal learning have been valued from different perspectives: political, educational, economical, professional, social, and so on. We are interested in understand, from an educational framework, how do adults put into perspective the learning that occurs outside the formal educational systems, namely in the work context, and how they value it. In this paper we intend to discuss some of the results obtained by a survey (developed by an interdisciplinary team and financed by the Portuguese government), centred on the study of the educational and professional trajectories of post-graduates of some Portuguese universities. We try to understand adult perspectives on Lifelong Learning, and discuss the results in the context of the higher education. Methodology: The sample for our survey (carried out in 2005) is composed of post-graduated students that returned in to the universities to get the highest levels of national academic diplomas (mestrados and PhD). In this survey, among other topics, we try to identify what adults think about the situations and the learning contexts that offered the best opportunity to learn something in the preceding year.Using the results presented at the report Lifelong Learning: citizen's views in close-up (2004) at the European level, we want to identify convergences and divergences between these results and the data gained from our national level (Portugal), regarding how adults put into perspective formal, informal and non-formal learning. Conclusions: The results of both surveys (European and national) point out that informal and non-formal learning have been highly valued by the individuals, specially the learning gained from the work contexts. We intend to raise questions about the changing roles of the Higher Education, namely how the institutions face the changes due to this knowledge transformation, how they recognise adult non-formal and informal learning, how are the universities responding to these new demands from individuals and from the society, and what sort of changes are at stake, from the institutional and educational point of view.