There’s an assumption throughout higher education that adult learners who want to finish their degree will simply return to the institution where they stopped out.
That’s actually not the case. The latest National Student Clearinghouse Research Center report on “some-college, no-credential” learners reveals that more than 60% of re-enrollees select a different institution than the one they previously attended. Even among recent stopouts, nearly half choose to re-enroll at another college.
In 2022-23, according to the Clearinghouse, more than 940,000 former students re-enrolled in higher education—an increase of 9.1% from the prior year. There’s obviously an appetite among former college students to finish what they started.
Yet most colleges and universities pour all of their resources into their traditional audiences of recent high school graduates and transfers from other institutions and spend nothing to locate and recruit their former students.
With the right data, better outreach and the willingness to seek out and recruit their own former students, colleges can improve their re-enrollment efforts. First, however, they must put aside these three significant and harmful misconceptions about adult learners:
Misconception No. 1: It’s too expensive for former students to return
Something often forgotten in discussions of stopped-out students is that they were once college students in good academic standing who were unable to finish because of a lack of money, health issues, child care responsibilities or any number of other personal reasons.
If students are academically ineligible to return, institutions should consider adopting one or more remediation strategies to give returning students a fresh start. Proven strategies include earned admissions—successfully completing a series of required courses that satisfy the institution’s admissions and also award academic credit—and allowing learners to retake courses to replace failing grades.
If money is the issue because students still owe fees or fines from their previous time in college, institutions should reduce or waive these outstanding balances.
And if a student has somehow exhausted all 12 semesters of Pell Grant eligibility, there’s an extremely good chance that this student is only a class or two short of graduating. An institution should discount the tuition to help that learner finish.
It’s most often the case that adult learners have adult commitments—families, jobs and other responsibilities—that make it difficult to return to an institution designed for recent high school graduates who can devote nearly all of their time to being college students.
In these instances, colleges should design academic programs that are flexible so adult learners can fit them into their busy lives and structured so they lead directly to completion without unnecessary detours or delays.
Misconception No. 2: Institutions can’t compete with online colleges
Many institutional leaders are often shocked to learn there’s a robust market in stopped-out students returning to college. But colleges can compete against the big marketing dollars of online-only institutions and improve their own re-enrollment rates if they’re willing.
The truth is, it’s usually the better option for stopped-out students, especially those closest to completing, to re-enroll at their former college unless they’re opting for a different degree program.
The reason? Transfer. Students returning to their former campus won’t lose credits or academic progress that they would if they attempt to reboot their academic career at another institution. That makes it more convenient and less expensive to return—and makes it faster to finish.
Institutions that strive to re-enroll their own stopped-out students should seek out more accurate contact data that might have grown stale, then make sure their former students hear this message. In many cases, adult students say that they have never been asked by their home institution if they want to return.
Then institutions should design a simplified re-enrollment process that immediately applies credit for prior learning, explicitly states a program’s cost and duration and spells out exactly how the institution will support adult learners through completion.
Misconception No. 3: Institutions should focus solely on recent stopouts and near-completers
Students who stopped out within the past year and students who have almost finished their degrees are the low-hanging fruit of the re-enrollment process. By all means, institutions should aggressively pursue these students, but these populations represent less than 12% of the stop-out universe.
Every state has set targets for increasing the percentage of working-age adults with college degrees and other credentials of value. To help meet these goals, institutions should collaborate with state policymakers and state postsecondary systems to recruit all stopped-out learners and support their efforts to return to campus.
Many enrollment leaders are well aware that a competitive environment and transfer rates mean re-enrolling former students produces a lower return on investment compared to recruiting new students. But consider the numbers: The population of stopped-out learners is more than 10 times as large as the number of high school graduates in any given year.
Stopped-out adult learners are out there, and they’re ready to re-enroll at their home institution — but only if colleges are willing to reach out to them, invest in them and support them when they return. Colleges have a responsibility to their own former students. Re-enrolling them is the smart thing to do.
More: FETC 2026
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