Dive Brief:
- The population of U.S. adults under age 65 with some college but no credential reached 36.8 million by July 2022, up 2.9% compared to the year before, according to a new analysis from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
- However, over 943,000 adults who stopped out of college reenrolled during the 2022-23 academic year, an increase of 9.1% from the prior year.
- Yet those improvements haven’t halted the growth of the stopped-out population. “Higher education regularly generates more students leaving school without a credential than returning to finish one,” Doug Shapiro, the research center’s executive director, said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
The clearinghouse’s report offers insight into the sought-after population of students with some college but no credential. Colleges are increasingly looking to attract this pool of learners to help offset an expected decline in the number of traditional-age students, typically considered under age 25.
The research center considers stopped-out students as part of the “some college, no credential” population when they have stepped away from higher education for at least three terms. While the report’s data focuses on working-age adults, it notes that there are also roughly 5.1 million people ages 65 and older who have attended some college but don't have a credential.
“The steady growth of the ‘some college, no credential’ population is a challenge in itself,” Shapiro said during a call with reporters Wednesday. “It's a persistent artifact of the higher education system as we know it.”
The pool of these students grew in all states in the 2022-23 academic year except Alaska, where the “some college, no credential” population stayed level, according to the report.
The report suggests stopped-out students may not be loyal to the institution they left. Of the 943,000-plus stopped-out students who returned to college in the 2022-23 academic year, only 37.2% came back to the same institution.
Moreover, these students often seek out entirely different types of institutions. Of returning stopped-out students who opted for a new college, 67.2% chose to attend an institution in a different sector.
“They may have left a four-year college and returned to a community college; they may have left a private institution and come back to a public institution,” Shapiro said. “This means that colleges need to do more than simply look to their own former students to identify candidates to reenroll.”
Primarily-online institutions are increasingly popular choices for returning students, according to the report.
For instance, 21.7% of students who stopped-out of a two-year public institution reenrolled at a primarily online institution. The same is true for 18.6% of returning students who stopped out at a public four-year institution.
Returning students may also seek a different degree type from the one in which they originally enrolled.
Of students who stopped-out of a bachelor’s degree but reenrolled in college in the 2022-23 academic year, 57.9% returned to the same type of program. But nearly one-third of those students, 30.1%, opted instead to pursue an associate degree.
Students are also more likely to reenroll in a liberal arts or general education major than a math or science major, Shapiro said.
“They're looking for the quickest route to a credential — anything that will help that prior investment pay off in the workforce,” he added.
