Dive Brief:
- A statewide effort in New Jersey to bring back students who left college before completing their credentials has spurred reenrollment for over 8,600 stopped-out students, according to a Tuesday announcement from the state higher education secretary’s office.
- Eighteen colleges will receive $1.6 million in grants to help stopped-out students cover things like unexpected expenses and application fees, the office said. Colleges will also be able to use the funds to create digital resources, specialized advising and in-person events for students.
- The secretary’s office announced it is working with Ithaka S+R, a consulting and research group, to study statewide initiatives to reenroll adult students, who are typically considered ages 25 and older.
Dive Insight:
Interest in reenrolling stopped-out students has grown as colleges stare down the demographic cliff, a sharp decline in traditional-age students expected to start in 2025 due to declining birth rates during the Great Recession.
The stopped-out student population is large. The U.S. had 36.8 million working-age adults with some college but no credential in mid-2022, a 2.9% increase over the year before, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. In New Jersey, nearly 750,000 residents have completed some college but not earned a credential.
In March 2023, New Jersey officials tapped ReUp Education — a company that works with colleges to contact stopped-out students and coach them through the reenrollment process — to work with 17 of the state’s institutions on the initiative. Since then, New Jersey has expanded the initiative to 22 of its public colleges.
The state officials say their reenrollment efforts complement the state’s goal for 65% of working-age residents to have a credential by next year. The state’s attainment rate for this population reached 58.9% in 2022, according to a tracker from Lumina Foundation.
So far, the reenrollment initiative has led to over 350 students graduating who had previously stopped out, according to Tuesday’s announcement.
New Jersey isn’t the only state reporting results from burgeoning reenrollment initiatives.
In 2021, North Carolina lawmakers allocated $97 million to launch Project Kitty Hawk, an ed tech nonprofit devoted to reenrolling students who had stopped out of the University of North Carolina System. After launching in May 2023, Project Kitty Hawk had reenrolled nearly 2,800 students by late August.
Similarly, an initiative called California Reconnect began in 2022 to reenroll stopped-out students across the state. During the program’s first year, over 5,700 former students were contacted and 8.4% reenrolled, according to a December announcement.
Seven campuses joined the pilot phase, and officials said last year they were on track to expand to another 13 institutions in 2024. They plan to add 10 more next year.
