Nearly four million students—one of the largest high school graduating classes in American history—are walking across commencement stages nationwide. But even as colleges prepare to welcome one of the biggest waves of graduates, higher education is bracing for a future defined by fewer students.
It’s the culmination of one era for American higher education and the beginning of another shaped by declining birth rates, shrinking enrollment pipelines and intensifying competition for learners.
That reality is helping fuel a growing movement across the country to re-engage adults who left college before earning a degree. In Michigan, a recent initiative focused on identifying former students has already re-enrolled 13,900 learners.
Similar efforts are underway in Tennessee, Maryland, and New Jersey. Just as critically, many of these programs are also focused on helping learners stay on track and finally finish what they started.
With more than 40 million U.S. adults having earned some college credit but no degree, this is no small task. But the reasons students leave college aren’t a mystery.
According to Lumina-Gallup’s 2024 State of Higher Education study, reasons such as financial, work or other life pressures are why adult learners were not currently enrolled in a certificate, certification, associates or bachelor’s degree program. Colleges have long struggled to accommodate learners who can’t put their lives on pause.
I learned that firsthand. It took me years of navigating higher education to understand what these students face.
I finished my bachelor’s and master’s as a full-time student, when I could orient my life entirely around school. By the time I started a Ph.D., I was working full-time and building a career.
School had to compete with everything else in my life, and it lost. I left before finishing my dissertation. I saw how quickly the structures of higher education stop working once life gets in the way.
No pause on learning
My experience is the new norm, not the exception. The full-time, residential undergraduate is a shrinking slice of who actually enrolls in college today, with students becoming older, working, raising children, or supporting themselves financially.
Roughly 40% work full-time while enrolled, and almost 20 percent have children. Approximately 16% of undergraduates are 30 or older. Too many of this new majority never finish.
What often gets missed: the students who pause their education don’t pause their learning. They acquire skills and knowledge at work or through military service. They earn technical certifications and credits from community colleges. But many institutions still struggle to translate this learning into credits on a transcript.
Research shows that institutions have major barriers to students receiving credit for prior learning, including specific transfer policies and fees, limiting the amount of credits for prior learning that are distributed, even at institutions that offer it.
In fact, more than half of US and Canadian colleges will not accept credit for prior learning for students who transfer, 85% limit the number of these credits that count toward a credential, and 67% charge a fee for one or more types of credit for prior learning that are accepted.
Conversations about credit for prior learning rarely focus on why so many students are still being asked to earn credit for things they already know. Such concerns deserve attention, and any program worth supporting takes them seriously.
At the same time, many of these discussions are shaped by perspectives rooted in more traditional higher education experiences—my own included. The institutions we attended counted our knowledge because we acquired it right on campus. That’s not always the reality for today’s college students.
The last big graduating classes
A new generation of providers is responding to that reality by overhauling their credit transfer policies, offering flexible scheduling, online learning, and competency-based models. As these models have expanded across higher education, skeptics argue that institutions are moving students through programs too quickly.
But the majority of learners who benefit from credit for prior learning are not blank slates. They are adults who have already spent years developing skills and expertise through work, military service or professional training.
The same outdated thinking shapes debates over online learning and competency-based programs. Critics too often dismiss these alternatives as inferior, ignoring how students actually live and learn today.
Millions of Americans can’t organize their lives around a full-time, residential model. They deserve options built around the realities of their lives.
For a long time, I saw leaving my Ph.D. program as a personal failure. I see it differently now. The system worked when I could give it my full attention. It stopped when I couldn’t—and I belatedly learned how few people the traditional model actually fits.
The four million high school students graduating this spring will be among the last big graduating classes higher education can count on for years. The 40 million adults still waiting to finish what they started are the future of American higher education.
