Colleges and universities—and the testing companies, enrollment-management firms and other participants in the admissions-industrial complex—collectively spend billions of dollars trying to get as many of the nearly four million high school graduates each year into a postsecondary institution near you.
Important work, to be sure, and a solid investment for society, given that most jobs still require some form of postsecondary education or training.
But at a time when the traditional high school–age population is set to shrink by 10 percent over the next decade—and when it’s increasingly obvious that one period of learning in our late teens and early 20s can’t possibly suffice in our lengthening lives—might it make more sense to spend at least a bit more of our collective time, energy and money driving the postsecondary success of the roughly 43 million Americans who went to college but failed to earn a credential?
Or, at the very least, focusing on the nearly three million of those people who during their time in college accumulated enough credits to qualify for an associate degree or the equivalent?
To be fair, we’re already paying more attention to the “some college, no degree” crowd than we used to. The National Student Clearinghouse began issuing reports on this population more than a decade ago and has done so regularly since 2022. Philanthropic organizations such as Lumina, Strada and Ascendium, among others, are funding various strategies aimed at re-engaging adult learners.
And lots of states, colleges, companies and nonprofit groups (including my colleagues at Ithaka S+R) are focusing meaningful attention on this learner population and more generally encouraging us to think broadly about creating a “learning society.”
Shifting from our current structure to an ecosystem focused on learning across a lifetime is a long game that will require pulling major policy levers and changing funding mechanisms. There’s a more urgent challenge—and opportunity—given the demographic and financial changes already cascading over us: the need for many if not most colleges to look beyond traditional-age learners to ensure their survival.
The importance of this issue was newly reinforced for me by “Earned but Not Awarded,” a recent report from Texas 2036, a nonpartisan public policy group. A fascinating chart in the report (hat tip to Glenda Morgan’s On Student Success newsletter for the referral) shows what happened to roughly 875,000 Texas public high school students after they graduated in the early 2010s.
Capitalizing on Texas’s top-notch data system for tracking how its residents move between education and work, the report shows that about three in five of those high school graduates made their way to a college or university in Texas, where their progress could be gauged. (Nearly 100,000 others enrolled in a college or university out of state, and almost 250,000 did not enter postsecondary education at all in the six years after high school.) Of the 540,000 who enrolled in a Texas college, 57 percent entered a community college and the rest went to a four-year institution. Within six years, not quite half (258,152) had earned a degree or certificate, as seen below.
Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board
The remainder—nearly 300,000 young adults—joined the “some college, no degree” ranks. The vast majority (251,218) earned fewer than the 60 credits normally required for an associate degree. More than 31,000, though, hit that mark but did not earn a credential. Texas 2036 calls them potential completers and has a wealth of information about them.
These were not mere dabblers: 70 percent earned all their credits at the four-year institution they originally enrolled in, and one in 10 (!!) earned at least 120 credits, the standard threshold for a bachelor’s degree. The rest attended multiple colleges or universities, and many lost credits they’d earned when the institution to which they transferred failed to recognize the courses.
Potential completers were more likely to be men than women, to be Black or Hispanic than Asian or white, and likelier than students generally to receive Pell Grants for low-income students.
And while these learners earned about the same pay as their peers with associate degrees upon entering the workforce, they soon fell behind: By their third year after leaving college, potential completers were less likely to be employed (74 percent versus 84 percent for associate degree holders) and saw less wage growth (55 percent versus 63 percent).
Every state has its own pool of such learners; the National Student Clearinghouse estimates that there are 2.7 million potential completers nationally who are poised to qualify for a postsecondary credential and very much targets for re-enrolling—if our highly diffuse postsecondary ecosystem can figure out how to serve them.
The Texas 2036 report lays out what some of those changes might look like:
- Enhancing reverse transfer and retroactive credentialing programs so that students who’ve earned enough credits to qualify for an associate degree can be awarded the credential by either their original community college or a four-year institution even after they’ve left. The Colorado Re-Engaged Initiative and initiatives in Florida, Maryland, Missouri and Oregon as well as Texas pursue this strategy.
- Embedding credentials at various points in curricula so students receive recognition earlier in their college careers. Utah Valley University is among the institutions moving aggressively on this front.
- Improving credit portability so courses transfer consistently across institutions, reducing wasted credits and lowering the risk of students leaving without a credential. This is a challenging problem to crack at anything approaching a national level because of how independently colleges operate, but organizations like the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, the Education Design Lab, and others have made learning mobility a top priority.
- Advancing competency-based education to let students earn credit for demonstrated skills and knowledge, providing additional pathways to completion and recognizing learning that occurs both in and outside the classroom.
Given how hard it can be to move the needle at the national level, work has to happen at more granular levels, too. State systems and less formal pairs and groups of two-year and four-year institutions can work better together to ensure that learners’ credits flow between them, emulating the transfer pathways established by exemplars like the University of Central Florida and Valencia College and George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College.
Individual colleges (or consortia of them) can expand their academic offerings beyond degrees to appeal more to working learners and adapt when and how they offer support to meet the needs of returning adults (this is not easy, but will be necessary).
This can be hard work. There’s a tendency to avoid undertaking it if there are easier options. The decline in the number of traditional-age students is closing other doors. Adult learners, those with some college and no degree, and potential completers present an opportunity that higher education cannot afford to pass up.
