36 Million Americans Went to College but Didn’t Earn a Degree. Here’s What We Know About the Ones Most Likely to Return and Succeed.

The ranks of traditional-age students are stagnating, which means colleges are increasingly looking to recruit from other groups, including those who are older. A popular pool — for both institutions and policy makers — is people who have some college under their belt but no degree.

A new report, “Some College, No Degree,” shines a spotlight on a specific group of them: the ones who are most likely to re-enroll and finish.

“Potential completers” are what the report’s authors, researchers at the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, call the 3.5 million adults who have collected what amounts to two years’ worth of full-time enrollment over the last decade.

They’re a small but important subset of the 36 million Americans the center’s database shows have attended some college, don’t have a degree or a certificate to show for it, and are no longer enrolled.

“Potential completers are the most relevant subgroup for institutions looking to increase enrollments today, as well as for policy makers looking to reach state and national postsecondary-attainment goals tomorrow,” the report says.

And according to the report, it’s likely that when potential completers return to college, they’ll do so in the state in which they were last enrolled. Roughly two-thirds of the students in the center’s database who re-enrolled and finished their education from 2014 to 2018 did so in the same state.

What else do the data show about potential completers?

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.