In high school, Timothy A. Duff made the honor roll each semester. He often worked ahead, completing assignments in class while teachers walked other students through the lessons. In particular, he had a head for math. After graduation he decided to study accounting at Tompkins Cortland Community College, in upstate New York, where the tuition was low and he could save money by living at home.
“After school, it just seemed like the natural thing was to go to college,” said Duff, who is now 55 and living in Ruffin, S.C. “It seemed like the natural progression.”
But his life took a turn when he was just shy of finishing his second year: His girlfriend became pregnant. He needed to get an apartment and support a family. He left college.
Duff’s girlfriend didn’t have the baby; they broke up. But by that time, the new semester had begun, and it was too late to re-enroll. Duff found work driving long-haul tractor-trailers, which paid much better than his part-time, suit-and-tie job at a local bank. In fact, his older brother, who’d earned a degree in computer science, was also driving a truck to pay off his student loans.
Three and a half decades later, Duff’s never returned to the classroom. As a trucker, he made good money and saw the country. Going back to college seemed less appealing. After his daughters were born, he took a job as a bookkeeper closer to home, digging out his old accounting textbooks to figure out how to write a business plan. Today, he is managing director and a co-owner of the company, which imports and distributes agricultural products.
Duff is one of more than 40 million Americans who attended college but left without earning a degree or credential, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Since the pandemic, the number has grown.
Talk to college presidents facing declining matriculation out of high school and a looming demographic cliff, and they’ll point to people like Duff as key to raising enrollment. After all, they have already shown an interest in college, and many have credits that would put them closer to earning a degree. Many colleges see these potential students — call them dropouts or stopouts or comebackers or potential completers — as an easy win.
It may not be so simple or straightforward, however. The reasons that students leave college are many and complicated. Some find themselves academically unprepared, laboring to keep up with their coursework, while others can’t shoulder the costs. Some are directionless, racking up a hodgepodge of credits with no clear idea of what to study; others flounder socially or struggle with mental-health challenges. For many, like Duff, life happens.
You can’t ask people to come back to a system that didn’t work for them the first time.
Likewise, the forces preventing students from returning to college are complex and the barriers high. It’s tough to balance a full course load with a job and family. Outstanding debts, even seemingly minor ones like library fees or parking fines, can block students from signing up for classes. The processes for re-enrolling are confusing and often opaque. And some who tried college have found they don’t need a diploma to earn a decent paycheck.
“You can’t ask people to come back to a system that didn’t work for them the first time,” said Laura Bernhard, a senior researcher at California Competes, an organization working to improve college completion in the states. She is the chief author of a new study looking at what it would take for students who left college to finish their degrees.
In fact, in a national poll of 1,025 adults by The Chronicle, less than half of respondents without a degree, just 44 percent, said they planned to take college courses again. Many have simply come to a conclusion: College isn’t for them.
For this story, The Chronicle followed up with about a dozen of those respondents and others who had dropped out to find out more about their thinking. (You can read related stories and learn more about our findings here.)
More than one described how their brush with college made them feel about higher education at a time when dissatisfaction is growing among many Americans. “Angry,” said John Bevan, a 35-year-old carpenter from Groton, Mass., who had his wages garnished for more than a decade to pay off loans from three false starts at college. “Angry.”
Over the years, Bevan has paid out far more in fees and interest than the roughly $10,000 he originally borrowed. “That’s so frustrating that somebody is making a lot of money off of that,” he said. “And it’s not you and I.”
No one really expected Alicia Rangel to go to college.
Many of her Abilene, Tex., classmates went from high school to low-wage jobs at the local Coca-Cola factory. Or they became “housewives,” she said. “You know, the white picket fence.”
Rangel, an effervescent 26-year-old with long, dark hair and a gap-toothed smile, envisioned a different life for herself: “to be big in the world,” she said. “I want ripples in the pond after me.”
But guidance about how to get to college was spotty. “The people who hold the resources,” she came to believe, “only sprinkle the information out to certain people.” Students who weren’t seen as college material, who didn’t like high school, who skipped extracurriculars and left campus early for after-school jobs — they didn’t get the same sort of help or encouragement.
One of her aunts lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Rangel had learned that California residents could qualify for free community-college tuition. When she excitedly shared the news with a college counselor at her high school, the adviser scoffed. If that were true, she was told, wouldn’t everyone head there for college?
She also found little support for her dreams of education at home. Neither of Rangel’s parents has a college degree, and she was expected to serve as a caregiver and surrogate parent for her three younger siblings. “I felt like my family wasn’t that encouraging of me as a woman of trying to go out and get my own,” she said of her tight-knit Hispanic clan. “They’d rather see me under the arm of somebody who can kind of take care of me.”
The Chronicle survey suggests that parents’ level of education plays a big role in the decision to go to college: Half of respondents who had a parent, guardian, or grandparent with a bachelor’s degree went on to earn one themselves, yet among those without college-educated parents, grandparents, or guardians, just a quarter were college graduates.
Rangel’s father, in particular, opposed her leaving home. Her announcement, at 18, that she was going to California for college led to an enormous blowup.
Balancing familial obligations with college ambitions is a common dilemma for Latinas like Rangel and is among the factors that lead young Hispanics to attend college at rates lower than their white peers. And the cultural push and pull doesn’t end with enrollment: The same pressures can increase their likelihood of dropping out. The gap in college-degree completion has only widened between Hispanic and white students in recent years, according to Excelencia in Education.
Rangel fought hard to get to college, but when she enrolled at the City College of San Francisco, she felt at sea. Her fellow students rushed between classes and work, and the campus felt impersonal, lacking the small-town warmth she had grown up with.
Early in her second semester, Rangel was waiting alone at a bus stop after a nighttime class when a man accosted her, grabbing her coat and her arm. An arriving bus scared off her attacker, who she said was likely mentally ill, but Rangel was unnerved.
Letting someone else discourage me from getting a better future, doing things I had my heart set on, was really disappointing.
She had only a few acquaintances of the sort who would lend you their notes if you missed a class, and no close friends to turn to, no community. She didn’t know where to go on campus to report the incident or find support. Even now, she doesn’t know if City College had a security patrol or campus shuttle that could have helped with her late-night commutes.
Her confidence shaken, Rangel began to doubt she had what it took to be a college student. Not long after the run-in at the bus stop, she quit going to classes. “Letting someone else discourage me from getting a better future, doing things I had my heart set on,” she said, “was really disappointing.”
Other obstacles can derail students, turning speed bumps in their college careers into detours out of higher education altogether. One of the most common events precipitating a student’s decision to leave was receiving a letter that they were on academic probation, according to research by California Competes.
Colleges intend such warnings to prompt students to seek tutoring and other academic resources to improve their grades, but students frequently interpreted the notices as “a clear message about whether they belonged at the institution,” said Su Jin Jez, the group’s chief executive. The message: “You’re not college material.”
Some onetime students who spoke with The Chronicle said they left college after a prolonged period of wheel-spinning. Matt Lopez, 37, spent three years as a full-time student at Los Medanos College, in the northern California city of Pittsburg, piling up credits in art and English, computer science and math, before taking a job at a grocery store.
Lopez said he didn’t know how to translate his interests, in computers and drawing, into a degree. His ADHD made it difficult to concentrate, and he didn’t know where to turn for guidance. “I needed a push. I never had the drive to do it myself,” he said. “I was going through the motions. I was going to college just to go.”
And John Bevan, the Massachusetts carpenter, grows anxious when he remembers the difficulty he had enrolling in courses at a local community college. He and a girlfriend spent the better part of a day shuffling from office to office, filing out financial-aid forms and aptitude tests, standing in one line only to be told it was the wrong one and they’d have to start over.
Too often, Bevan and others said, institutions’ everyday processes erect barriers that deter college-shy students from re-enrolling. Instead, they should be viewed as customers.
“If you want me to come back, make it easy, make it convenient,” he said. “At this point in my life, I don’t need you, you need me. So treat me like it.”
Growing up in a well-off suburb of Cleveland, Bevan decided early on that college wasn’t for him. When his second-grade class was assigned a project on what they wanted to be when they grew up, his classmates chose doctor, lawyer, accountant, football player. Bevan wanted to be a carpenter, like his father. He didn’t like the idea of being stuck behind a desk.
But as the end of high school neared, his father encouraged him to think about college, citing his own experience losing out on project-management jobs to less-experienced candidates who had four-year degrees. And so Bevan agreed to go, planning to major in architectural engineering.
Bevan, who has a full beard and a fondness for the Grateful Dead and dad jokes, genuinely liked college and the freedom to study the subjects of his choosing, unlike in high school. Among his favorites was creative writing, which satisfied his curiosity; he wandered the campus taking notes on the people around him.
There was no big breaking point, no single event that soured him on college. But he couldn’t stick with it for more than a semester or two, taking classes at two different Ohio community colleges, Lorain County and Columbus State.
The costs added up — tuition and textbooks and student fees and a computer to write his papers — and he couldn’t hold down more than part-time work while juggling his courses. He’d leave school to try to save money, and the cycle would repeat.
By that point, Bevan was in his mid-20s, and many of his friends were graduating from college. But he realized that having a degree didn’t guarantee a good job. Some of his former classmates were working as bartenders or waiters to pay the bills. Bevan did the math and figured he could make more money if he returned to his original plan, working as a carpenter.
He’s far from wealthy, he said, but he makes a comfortable wage. “As long as I have my tools and a driver’s license, I can go anywhere and make a living.”
Last year, Bevan moved from Ohio to New England to be with his fiancée and her two children. In preparation, he posted to an online carpentry forum that he was looking for work; within a day, he’d been contacted by several prospective employers for interviews and accepted a job.
Respondents with some college who indicated they would not take more classes were most likely to select the following as a major reason or reason.
Don't need it/have a job or career that I like
57%
Not enough time/other obligations
48%
The argument for college is often framed in dollars and cents, with economists and educators pointing to the college wage premium — a typical graduate with a bachelor’s degree annually out-earns someone with just a high-school diploma by $30,000, or nearly 75 percent, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
But for some adults, the economic rationale for staying in — or returning to — college doesn’t necessarily hold. A recent paper examined state work-force data to compare the employment outcomes of graduates of Virginia community colleges to classmates who had left without a degree, focusing on dropouts who’d amassed a significant number of credits and earned GPAs of 2.0 or higher — in other words, those who would have the greatest likelihood of finishing their degree if they returned.
“The hypothesis was, ‘Gosh, won’t there be so much benefit if they re-enroll?’” said Benjamin L. Castleman, an associate professor of public policy and education at the University of Virginia and an author of the paper.
But their wages, rather than plateauing or stagnating, as the researchers had expected, actually increased steadily after they left college. In fact, across 19 different fields of study, the researchers didn’t find statistically significant differences in earnings between graduates and nongraduates, said Kelli A. Bird, Castleman’s fellow lead author and colleague at Virginia.
Bird and Castleman are careful to say that their findings shouldn’t be read as an argument for not returning to college. For one, they studied people who’d left or graduated from community colleges only, not four-year institutions. And there may be some fields where getting a degree does confer a greater earnings advantage — although in those disciplines, like nursing and health care, colleges often don’t have enough capacity to enroll more students.
“We need to recognize there are rational economic reasons why former students are not re-enrolling,” Castleman said. If colleges want to attract those students, “they need to craft policy that respects those nuances.”
Even those who relied on a clear-eyed calculus to leave college can second-guess their decision. “There’s days like today where it’s cold and I’m working outside — it stinks,” Bevan said one blustery December day.
“But then there’s days when the sun’s shining and it’s 75 degrees out and it’s beautiful out. And I’m laughing and joking with the guys I work with. I wouldn’t give this up for anything.”
Still, Bevan sometimes wonders if college graduates think a little less of him. He tries to brush it off.
When Bevan was a younger man, he had a drinking problem, and he’s been sober for more than a decade. He’s open about his efforts to quit drinking. “It was something I did, it was something I went through, and by sharing, I might be able to help somebody else,” he said. “It should be the same when I talk about dropping out of college. But it does feel a little more shameful or harder to talk about.”
Adeline Ayres tried to stay in college when she had her first child at 20, taking courses at night while stringing together work as a housekeeper and video-rental clerk. Then she landed a job as a corrections officer for the sheriff’s department in Suffolk County, on Long Island. The long and unpredictable hours and her growing family made continuing her studies impossible.
I would have loved to wear dress clothes and have a nice office job, to be more feminine. But that ship has sailed.
Ayres kept the corrections job for more than three decades, retiring in 2022, at age 55. In her final year, she earned $269,000, with overtime, although she acknowledges that the pay may not be as good for new hires.
The work was hard, and Ayres sometimes imagines what could have been. “I would have loved to go to school,” she said. “I would have loved to wear dress clothes and have a nice office job, to be more feminine. But that ship has sailed.”
Zak Spencer, a 33-year-old pharmacy technician from Roanoke, Va., doesn’t rule out returning to college but is leery after hearing friends complain about the “mountain of student-loan debt they have.”
“I don’t mind incurring debt and loans for an education,” he said, “but not ones that I will be paying off with my retirement checks.”
Just weeks before Jackie Whiteley started college, her mother died. Whiteley left after a semester to care for her grieving father, intending to return. But when she tried to re-enroll, she was told she first needed to pay back what she owed, about $1,800. By the time she had paid off the debt, she had one child and a second on the way. “I sort of admitted defeat,” said Whiteley, now 44 and a retail worker in Michigan.
The ability to pay is an important barometer of student success — only about 15 percent of students from the lowest-income families earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while eight in 10 of those from the wealthiest families do.
Bevan calls the student debt he accrued an “expensive lesson” and said rising tuition would keep him from going back. He, and many of those who spoke with The Chronicle, question why college costs so much — and who is to blame.
Many point the finger at colleges themselves. The fact that the football coach is the highest-paid employee at many universities is a sign of upside-down priorities, Bevan said. “I’m a football fan. I watch the Cleveland Browns every Sunday. But why does that guy get a scholarship because he can catch a ball, but it’s going to cost me an arm and a leg if I want to go back to college?”
Tim Duff, the import-company owner, looks at colleges and sees bloat and inefficiency. Administrators and professors are overpaid, he said, and the job security guarantees their salaries even if they do a poor job in the classroom. “Even way back in my day, there were college professors with their feet up on the desk,” he said. “They got paid either way. It didn’t really matter if I sat in the class and paid attention.”
Duff’s a bottom-line sort of guy, and he doesn’t know if college adds up for everyone. Why take on enormous student debt for a job that pays modestly? But unless the consumers, the students and parents, say enough’s enough, he is pessimistic that the costs of college will be reined in. College should be more like a supermarket, he said. If they sell overpriced goods or rotting produce, shoppers take their business elsewhere.
Duff is boyish and folksy, proud to say he is a graduate of the school of hard knocks. He doesn’t spend a lot of time reconsidering his decision to leave college or his choice not to return.
His father struggled to read and didn’t make it past the fifth grade, but he gave his sons a solid middle-class upbringing. Not all smarts come from books, Duff said. Adaptability is important. So is learning from your mistakes. “You can’t teach common sense,” he said. “And as they say, it’s not as common as it used to be.”
Duff isn’t alone in his skepticism of a college education. In The Chronicle survey, fewer than one in three people with some college but no degree said that colleges did an excellent or very good job educating students. Americans as a whole had a more favorable view, with 40 percent giving colleges high marks on their core mission.
31%of respondents with some college said colleges do a very good or excellent job of educating their students.
Andre Alderson took a few college courses during his time in the Navy, but he picked up most of the skills he needs for his work, in water treatment, during his military service or on the job. It’s hard not to feel some resentment, said Alderson, who is 55 and lives in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., east of Los Angeles, when college graduates come into his workplace and try to boss him and his colleagues around.
“They say, ‘Oh, I went to school for this and that,’” said Alderson, who oversees safety and maintenance at four water-reclamation plants in southern California. “Then we go out and run circles around them. What’s learned in class and what has to be done in the real world isn’t the same.”
While some question whether colleges teach their students enough of what they need, others argue that too much of the curriculum is superfluous, unnecessary, wasteful. “If you’re going to be an accountant,” said Ayres, the former corrections officer, “do you need to know history, English lit, and pottery?” Mandatory Spanish-language courses, she suggested, would be far more useful.
Ayres put her three children — who now work in pharmaceuticals, human resources, and veterinary medicine — through college. She’s proud of it. But she takes a dark view of the political climate in higher education today. Campuses should be neutral ground, said Ayres, who described herself as a conservative. Instead, they promote an ideological orthodoxy, silencing students with different or unpopular points of view, she said.
“There’s no need for your calculus teacher or your English teacher to be talking politics in the classroom,” Ayres said. “Just shut your mouth and teach.”
Duff thinks colleges too often act as a gatekeeper, a screening mechanism that reserves job opportunities for graduates while keeping others out.
That’s not how he hires in his own company. On a recent morning, while Duff was being interviewed in the main office, one of his newest employees came through on his way to the warehouse. “Good morning, sir,” he greeted Duff. The “gentleman,” as Duff called him, didn’t have much education, and he had trouble filling out his tax paperwork. But he was a hard worker, putting in hours after an overnight shift at a nearby assembly plant.
Duff acknowledged that higher education isn’t a prerequisite for the sort of work many of his employees do, boxing up products and shipping them around the country. But plenty of other jobs call for a college degree that don’t truly need one, he argued. Does it take two years of college, or four, to answer phones or do data entry?
Years ago, his family hosted an exchange student from Switzerland. In that country, he learned, students take an aptitude test to determine whether they should go to college. But higher education isn’t the only route to a good job — look at all the Swiss high-school students who pursue apprenticeships, learning a profession on the job.
“There are absolutely things we need a college degree for. Nobody becomes a medical doctor from trial and error, other than Frankenstein,” Duff said. “But I think we put too much emphasis on having that paper.”
Duff’s view of college isn’t black-and-white, though. One of his daughters got a community-college degree. The youngest was valedictorian of her high-school class and earned a full scholarship to college, he said, but dropped out, just weeks into her first semester.
Everything turned out just fine: She has a good job and owns her own home, Duff said.
When Duff’s kids were younger, he not only talked with them about the pros and cons of college, he counseled their friends. Several, he said, were straight-A students but came from families too poor to afford college. He agreed to co-sign their student loans. It’s a decision he’s never regretted.
Like Duff, few dropouts have entirely written off higher education. Three-quarters of those with some college but no degree told The Chronicle that they would encourage a friend or relative to continue their studies, a share that reflects the responses of the broader population. Maybe college didn’t pan out for them, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad choice for other people.
Respondents with some college were much more likely to recommend college to others than to indicate an interest in taking more courses themselves.
I would advise a friend or relative to pursue a bachelor's degree.
75%
I intend to take classes again in the future.
44%
Colleges, they said, also have a broader value: They can contribute to a skilled work force and conduct research that benefits society. Bevan spent a few years in the college town of Oberlin, Ohio, and said the liberal-arts institution there does a lot of good for the community, preserving green space and holding concerts. Each summer it hosts a world-class theater festival, and local residents can attend free of charge.
But 40 million Americans started college and then stopped. That means too much in higher ed doesn’t work for too many people, both experts and average citizens agree.
California Competes researchers talked with adults who returned to college, trying to pinpoint not just what led them to drop out but why things clicked the second time around.
Some of the fixes were on the front end. For example, the group is working with college partners, at California State University at Sacramento and Shasta College, to change their approach to academic probation to emphasize academic support, rather than stern warnings.
Certain practices particularly benefit older students, the researchers said. College outreach should highlight students who look like them. Too many admissions websites have options for high-school students and transfers but not for returning adults. Offering courses online and in shorter chunks, rather than full semesters, gives greater flexibility for working students and lets them balance their studies with caring for children or aging parents. Students may need financial assistance not just to cover their tuition but to pay for other, less visible, costs, like child care.
Henry Gage grew up in Prince George’s County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C. He signed up for community college but quickly realized it wasn’t for him. “High school 2.0,” he said.
His father advised him to find a career, but nothing he studied seemed to offer a long-term future. Then, early in the pandemic, Gage, 25, realized he couldn’t keep working at a big-box retailer. Searching online, he came across a nonprofit career-development organization called Merit America.
Through Merit America, students can get online technical training and earn industry certifications from Google in a handful of high-tech fields, augmenting the coursework with academic counseling and career coaching to help them stay on track. Gage earned a certificate in information-technology support, and today he works for Cisco, troubleshooting technology issues for customers.
Alison Anderson was a 40-year-old stay-at-home mother when she came across a post about Merit America while scrolling TikTok. For Anderson, who attended college in Florida and New York but never finished, Merit America’s model was appealing — students don’t pay for their training upfront, but rather pay a flat fee of no more than $95 a month over five years once they are in a job and making a certain salary. “It was all the opportunity and very little risk,” said Anderson, who studied the Java programming language and now works for a software company.
Rebecca Taber Staehelin, one of the two founders and chief executives of Merit America, said the model works, partly because it seems achievable. “They see the light at the end of the tunnel, not in years but in months.”
Taber Staehelin said Merit America doesn’t compete with college, but works in concert. Some students could earn credentials through Merit America that eventually count toward a college degree or certificate, while some college graduates might turn to it for additional technical training. “We are trying to strengthen educational pathways and options,” she said, “not blow up higher ed.”
In California, a four-year-old online-only community college is working specifically to serve working adults without degrees, a population that totals 2.5 million in the state between ages 25 and 34 alone.
Calbright College’s curriculum and support services have been designed with the adult learner in mind: Students are assessed at the outset for the skills and knowledge they have, not just from their prior education but from working. Courses are asynchronous and self-paced, but students are assigned an academic counselor who monitors their progress and reaches out if they get bogged down or haven’t been online recently. Office hours are held in groups for students who might not be comfortable speaking up one on one. “We try to be intentional in our support for students from the start,” said Shannon McCarty, Calbright’s vice president for learning and instruction.
Alicia Rangel, the transplant from Texas whose counselor told her free college was a pipe dream, was herself initially skeptical of Calbright, which charges no tuition or fees to California residents. But as a digital native, she is comfortable learning online, opening up her laptop to complete assignments whenever she has a free moment.
Rangel found a sense of community online that she never had in person. When, as a newbie, she was having trouble navigating the online-student portal, a fellow student replied to her message almost instantaneously — after midnight on a Saturday.
Now she tries to help create that community for others, working as a peer tutor and student ambassador. She logs on for study groups and career workshops, and she and another student, who have never met, started a virtual art club. When she suddenly spaces out in the middle of a conversation with her boyfriend, Dylan, looking at her phone, he knows she’s probably in the Calbright Slack channel, direct-messaging a student in need of help.
Rangel’s family still calls, years after she left Abilene for Oakland, to urge her to return home. “Like crabs in a bucket that keep each other down,” she said. Even as she pushes back, she wrestles with guilt, worrying she abandoned her sister and brothers. “It’s always just in the back of my head,” she said, “I shouldn’t have left my siblings.”
For now she focuses on the exam she wants to take in the next couple of months, to become certified in information-technology support, and after that, a course in cybersecurity. “I have a real desire to finish this,” she said, “for myself.”
Brian O’Leary created data graphics for this story and Michael Theis edited the videos.
