As institutions nationwide face enrollment declines and demographic pressures, they are increasingly looking to re-enroll adults who started college but never finished—not only to fill their coffers but also to bolster state workforce pipelines. More than 43 million Americans have earned some college credit but never completed a degree or credential, representing a significant pool of potential students.
New research from ReUp Education, an organization that helps college stop-outs re-enroll and complete their degrees, finds that most states still rely on fragmented, short-term initiatives rather than coordinated statewide strategies to bring those learners back. To help states assess and strengthen those efforts, the report introduces an Adult Learner Engagement Index that allows policymakers to evaluate their strategies and identify opportunities to improve adult learner engagement.
Kimberly Walker, vice president of government strategy at ReUp and the report’s author, said states that have been most successful at bringing adult learners back to college and supporting them through completion tend to centralize their efforts and coordinate multiple strategies rather than rely on isolated initiatives.
“When states don’t coordinate, the initiatives tend to falter, and then they use that as proof that there’s no interest in that particular adult learner engagement strategy or that program or that initiative,” Walker said. “In reality the underutilization is really related to the dissemination of knowledge, to reaching out to the folks and even letting them know these opportunities are available.”
Walker also said successful states avoid creating overly restrictive eligibility requirements for adult learner programs and scholarships.
“These are busy folks. They’re adults. They’re working,” she said. “Most of them are working more than one job, and they don’t have time to read through your three pages of exceptions of who qualifies for that scholarship.”
From data to action: The Adult Learner Engagement Index evaluates state efforts across three core areas: student incentive support, institutional innovation and outreach and engagement. It also assesses strategies including scholarships, institutional debt review, student-centered policy changes, institutional incentives, communities of practice, data and analytics, marketing, and coaching.
The report identifies data collection and analysis as the most common starting point for state action, but Walker said collecting data is only the first step. Without coordinated outreach, institutional support and learner-centered policies, she said, states are unlikely to see meaningful results.
“What I try to caution states against is becoming a treasure trove of useless data,” Walker said. “What we see a lot is [states] put such a herculean effort to get the data infrastructure, to get the talent, to mine the data, to make it usable, to translate it to policymakers … and then they have no enrollment efforts.”
While data can help states understand where opportunities exist, Walker said it must be followed by intentional efforts to reconnect with adult learners.
“You start with the data and the information because that’s how you understand, but then there’s another step after that,” she added.
Walker pointed to Michigan’s Lifelong Education, Advancement and Potential office as an example of a centralized state effort focused on supporting adult learners and other nontraditional populations. She also highlighted New Jersey’s Some College, No Degree initiative as an example of a state pairing outreach efforts with wraparound services designed to support learners through completion.
Another area where states continue to fall short, Walker said, is providing incentives for institutions to expand their adult learner efforts. The report found only 19 states offer incentives to encourage institutions to enroll and serve adult learners, limiting colleges’ ability to build sustainable programs.
Walker argued that states should avoid placing additional expectations on institutions without providing the resources needed to meet them.
“The 19 states that do incentives have learned that the institutions that are ready to receive this population, that are ready to support this population, just need a little help,” she said.
Building better systems: The report recommends that state leaders aggregate postsecondary and workforce data to identify enrollment trends, workforce needs and opportunities for investment. It also calls on states to conduct a statewide inventory of adult learner initiatives across agencies, systems and institutions to identify existing programs and potential gaps.
In addition, the report recommends centralizing adult learner initiatives under a coordinating state agency leader to reduce fragmentation and building sustainable programs that reduce barriers, avoid overly restrictive eligibility requirements and reach stopped-out learners earlier to persuade them to return to college.
At the institutional level, Walker said colleges should create flexible one-stop models so adult learners do not have to navigate multiple offices and departments to access the services they need. She also encouraged institutions to review how they communicate those resources online, noting that information for veterans, transfer students and other populations is often difficult to find on college websites.
Over all, Walker said, the Adult Learner Engagement Index is intended to give higher education leaders and policymakers a framework to evaluate their current efforts and identify opportunities to better serve adult learners.
“We’re probably going to be experiencing not just economic headwinds, but a continued enrollment cliff and misalignment of skills and the workforce,” Walker said. “The states that get this adult learning population right are going to be the ones that come out better on the other end of this.”
Get more content like this directly to your inbox. Subscribe here.