The vast majority of postsecondary institutions can no longer rely on a relentless stream of new high school graduates to help them meet their enrollment and budget targets, much less prosper and grow. As institutions look to adapt to scarcity in their traditional enrollment pools and build their financial resilience, they must learn how to compete for and serve adult learners.
Nearly 42 million American adults have earned college credits but not a degree, creating a population of potential learners that’s more than twice the size of current undergraduate enrollment. Roughly a third of all undergraduates are 25 and older, which suggests there’s an appetite among adult learners to earn credentials to further their career prospects.
Many institutions have opted not to invest in ways to reach this audience largely because past attempts to recruit former students yielded only minimal enrollment gains. Yet as demographic data for traditional-aged college students continues to trend downward, institutions should realize that incentivizing the some college, no degree population to come back to college and serving them better when they return is the gateway to stabilizing enrollment.
Here are three strategies institutions should consider to re-engage and support adult learners:
Understand why students left school—and why they return.
Many students stop out because of money — but it’s hardly the full picture. When the University of Idaho sought clarity, it found that the most common reason for stopping out was the difficulty students encountered when trying to balance school with personal and professional demands. Cost and financial aid were second. Students also said they had difficulty getting access to online and hybrid programs and worried that they could not succeed at school.
Using these insights, the university adapted new policies, academic programs and course structures to ease the multiple burdens on adult learners. By building a better pathway back to higher education for adult learners, Idaho realized six straight semesters of enrollment growth.
Sustainable heat: Options, challenges and opportunities for campuses
Institutions also must realize that what motivates high school seniors to attend college is not what motivates stopped-out learners to return to college. Rather than focusing on a traditional college experience that will prepare them for their first job or help them grow into adulthood, returning adult learners are more concerned with achieving a specific goal. These often include obtaining a promotion, switching careers, building a better life for their family, or simply the satisfaction in finishing what they started. Colleges should ensure that their programs and outreach are aligned with these learners’ goals.
Remove barriers to re-entry
Adult learners aren’t traditional students, so institutions shouldn’t expect them to follow the same enrollment path as recent high school graduates. Institutions can save busy adult learners time by getting rid of requirements to write admissions essays, round up recommendation letters or obtaining high school transcripts. In New Jersey, several institutions have reimagined orientation to address specific concerns and time constraints of adult learners.
Institutions can save prospective students money by waiving admissions fees and offering targeted financial assistance, such as debt forgiveness, textbook stipends and scholarships for returning students who are near completion. Institutions such as Indiana Tech offer returning students tuition discounts and scholarships each semester until they complete their program.
When institutions remove these barriers, it signals to adult learners that a college understands their struggles and can increase the possibility they will return.
Support returning learners from re-enrollment to completion.
This is where the work really begins.
To ease the transition to college, Montclair State University in New Jersey created a two-credit course, the Adult Academic Success Seminar, that eases the transition to college and satisfies a general education requirement.
Because adult learners have busy lives, they require after-hours access to a trusted academic advisor to help them with program and course selection and connect them to holistic student support resources. Another New Jersey institution, Hudson County Community College, addresses this need through its award-winning Hudson Scholars program. By providing individualized advising, academic support and financial stipends, the college has decreased melt, increased student retention and created a financially self-sustaining program.
And because adult learners often re-enroll to earn credentials to help them start a new job or advance in their current one, it’s imperative that institutions provide a wide range of personalized development opportunities that connect college and career. The leaders of Texas State University were concerned that they would compromise its high standard of student care when it expanded a pilot program to bring back stopped-out students. To provide the same level of care at scale, the university assigned each returning student a success coach to give them the personalized support, resources and encouragement they needed to meet their personal, professional and education goals and complete their degree.
Plunging over the college enrollment cliff should serve as a wake-up call for higher education. But by expanding and improving their efforts to enroll and support adult learners — and by identifying and lowering barriers that stand in the way of all students — institutions might land in a better place.
