After busy adults arrive home from a long workday and attend to dinner and family responsibilities, they may have just a few moments left for themselves. If they have been considering enrolling in a degree program to advance their career, they go online to do research.
As programs catch their attention, they click through to the college’s website. Unfortunately, they often cannot easily determine admissions requirements, program length, cost, or whether the program is offered online or in-person.
Given the competing demands they already face, they are unlikely to push through the frustration and fatigue to gather the information they need. More often, they simply move on.
Adult learners approach college as they would any other major investment—a home, car, or other significant asset. E-commerce has fundamentally reshaped consumer expectations about access to information and services, and it now includes higher education.
Prospective students expect an intuitive, convenient, and transparent user experience. They want sufficient information for comparing programs, completing transactions online, and in many cases, studying online, as well.
This means eliminating unnecessary points of friction throughout the student journey that can cause them either to enroll elsewhere or abandon their plans to return to college altogether.
Facilitating the discovery stage
The first step is to examine the student journey from the first moment an adult learner discovers a program or institution, beginning with its website. The importance of a well-organized, easy-to-navigate website that provides comprehensive admissions and enrollment information cannot be overstated.
Prospective students should be able to quickly find answers to basic questions about tuition, admissions, program length, learning outcomes, financial aid, and career opportunities. They should be able to take the next step seamlessly, whether contacting an admissions representative, attending an information session, or submitting an application.
Well-designed e-commerce websites provide a useful model because they reflect the user experience consumers have come to expect in nearly every aspect of their lives.
Once enrolled, adult learners should be able to register for classes, pay tuition, schedule advising appointments, access online coursework, and receive timely answers to their questions without difficulty. Too often, however, these processes remain cumbersome and fragmented.
Student services should be available when adult learners need them, typically during evenings and weekends. An office that closes at 5:00 p.m. without offering alternative means of assistance is poorly aligned with the realities of adult learners’ schedules.
Barriers such as these can reinforce students’ doubts about whether pursuing further education is worth the effort.
Tailoring education for adult learners
Adult learners pursue higher education to advance their careers, improve their earning potential, and achieve greater financial security while balancing employment, family responsibilities, and other commitments.
As a result, many benefit from flexible online learning, accelerated programs, personalized learning pathways, and curricula that connect learning to their professional goals.
During COVID, online learning was criticized as public schools and colleges transitioned rapidly to remote instruction without time for planning or instructional redesign. Today, high-quality online education has become a well-established mode of delivery.
Colleges across the US now offer rigorous degree programs online at all levels, with well-defined learning outcomes, meaningful assignments, and multiple opportunities for students to apply concepts learned. When thoughtfully designed and delivered, online education provides learning experiences equivalent to or better in quality than those offered in traditional classroom settings.
Also, accelerated course formats are attractive to adult learners because they enable steady progress toward a degree while adults balance other responsibilities. Successful accelerated courses require thoughtful instructional design. Institutions should avoid simply compressing a traditional 15-week course into eight weeks while expecting students to complete the same assignments.
Instead, accelerated courses should be intentionally redesigned to reflect the realities of a shorter instructional period. Institutions should provide instructional designers, technological resources, and ongoing professional development to help faculty create high-quality learning experiences that preserve rigor while accommodating the compressed scheduling requirements of adult learners.
Making good use of AI and automation
Higher education can learn from e-commerce by making better use of AI and automation such as AI-powered chatbots. While these have implemented them many institutions, their capabilities are often limited, leaving significant opportunities unrealized.
Sophisticated AI systems can answer routine questions accurately and instantly, reducing administrative workload while improving the student experience. Intelligent automation can help faculty and staff devote more time to interactions that genuinely require human intervention, empathy, and judgment, e.g., helping students evaluate career options, navigate personal challenges, or make important academic decisions.
Used thoughtfully, AI should enhance—not replace—the human relationships that remain central to higher education.
Leadership and specialized expertise
Colleges that have traditionally focused on high school graduates find it challenging to identify the changes needed to serve adult learners. Understanding their unique needs, motivations, and circumstances requires specialized expertise developed through years of work in adult education.
Institutions should engage experienced adult learning professionals to assess existing policies, practices, and student services, identify unnecessary barriers, and recommend evidence-based strategies for creating a more adult-centered educational environment.
Finally, implementing these changes requires more than good intentions. Sustained institutional commitment, adequate resources, and visible leadership are essential. When presidents and senior leadership establish adult learner success as a strategic priority, institutions are far more likely to align policies, investments, and organizational culture around that goal.
Without explicit executive support, such initiatives are far more likely to lose momentum or fail.
Adults who return to school make significant investments of time, money, and effort in the hope of improving their careers and their lives. Colleges and universities can honor that investment by removing unnecessary barriers throughout the student journey and by making educational experiences more relevant, transparent, responsive, and flexible.
None of these improvements requires compromising academic quality. On the contrary, thoughtfully designed systems and programs can strengthen learning while increasing the likelihood that adult learners will persist through graduation. Institutions that recognize this reality and act now will be better positioned to attract, support, and retain the growing population of adult and online learners.
