Working-age adults with some college but no credential reaches 37.6M, report finds

Dive Brief:

• Some 37.6 million working-age adults had some college credits but no credential at the start of the 2023-24 academic year, according to new data released Wednesday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The population, up 2.2% nationally from the previous year, increased across all states.
• But reenrollment among “some college, no credential” adults climbed by 2.7%, marking the second annual increase in a row.
• The 2023-24 academic year also marked the first time more than 1 million stopped-out students reenrolled in a single academic year. A majority of states and the District of Columbia saw the uptick, ranging from a 0.7% increase in Washington, D.C., to a 35.2% jump in Massachusetts, the clearinghouse said.

Dive Insight:

 Colleges are increasingly looking to nontraditional students to weather long-predicted declines in the number of high school graduates. The large population of “some college, no credential,” or SCNC, adults may offer one potential solution. 

The clearinghouse defines SCNC adults as those who have been unenrolled for at least three terms. 

Stopped-out students with at least two years of full-time enrollment in the past decade — referred to as potential completers — are more likely to earn a credential than their SCNC counterparts, according to the new data.

“These students are often closer to completion and younger than the broader SCNC population, making them a high potential group for targeted reengagement,” Matthew Holsapple, the clearinghouse’s senior director of research, said during a Tuesday call with reporters.

Though potential completers make up just 7.5% of SCNC adults, they earned more than 30% of the credentials awarded to previously stopped-out students who reenrolled in the past two years, according to Holsapple.

And recent stop-outs — defined as adults who were last enrolled in college four to five academic terms prior — show potential for colleges looking to bring former students back into the fold.

Nearly half of recent stop-outs reenroll at the colleges they last attended, suggesting “timely outreach” from institutions can make a difference, Holsapple said. 

“These patterns suggest that recency and accumulated credits are strong predictors of successful reengagement,” he said. “That’s a critical insight for institutions and policymakers seeking to design effective outreach and support strategies.”

SCNC adults may also have benefited from state or institutional policies that award credentials to stopped-out students for credits they’ve already earned, the clearinghouse said. About 1 in 4 SCNC students who went on to earn their first credential do so without reenrolling in college.

One such policy change, a new initiative in Colorado, allows the state’s public four-year colleges to grant associate degrees to students who earned at least 70 credit hours before stopping out in the last decade.

In 2023-24, 2,100 formerly stopped-out students earned a credential in Colorado, up from 900 the year prior. Among that group, 800 received credentials without reenrolling in college, up from 100 in 2022-23.