While undergraduate enrollment is inching toward pre-pandemic levels, colleges are still struggling to re-engage the millions of Americans who dropped out of college without finishing their degrees.
The number of working-age adults with some college experience but no credential — students who have stopped out, as they’re known — increased 2.9 percent from July 2021 to July 2022, reaching a total of 36.8 million, according to a report released on Thursday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. That represents roughly one in five Americans who held at least a high-school diploma, a representative of the center said.
In a bright spot for higher ed, though, more former students returned to college during that time span.
The number of students who re-enrolled from 2022 to 2023 rose by 78,300. In last year’s report, that figure fell by 80,000. According to the new data, 934,000 students who previously dropped out are now back in college.
During the same period, about 2.3 million students stopped pursuing their degrees — a grim number, but slightly fewer than the center reported last year.
People who had previously enrolled in college for at least two years within the last decade were three times as likely to try again, the new report says, with 6.1 percent of them re-enrolled in 2022-23. By contrast, just 2.1 percent of “some college, no degree” adults with not as much college experience re-enrolled.
Colleges must also take into account, researchers wrote in the report, that nearly two-thirds of students who returned to college switched to a different institution. Most changed sectors, too, such as going from a four-year college to a community college.
Doug Shapiro, executive director of the research center, said during a call with reporters that colleges must begin looking beyond their former students to identify candidates for re-enrollment.
People with some college but no credential continued to be disproportionately Hispanic, Black, Native American, and male, while women, white, and Asian re-enrollees were more likely to finish a credential in the first year or continue enrollment. Yet young women were more likely to be recent stop-outs, as was the case in previous years, according to the new report.
Instead of pursuing higher-level degrees, students are opting for shorter-term programs when they re-enroll, such as associate or certificate programs, the report says.
“They’re looking for the quickest route to a credential — anything that will help that prior investment pay off for them in the work force,” Shapiro said.
Primarily online institutions are also becoming increasingly popular for re-enrollees, yet students who re-enroll at such colleges tend to earn the lowest credentials among all postsecondary sectors after two years.
Unlike the center’s previous “some college, no degree” reports, this year’s issue counted only working adults, which it defined as people ages 18 to 65.
While the report does not specify the factors leading to the persistent increase in stop-outs, the phenomenon can be attributed to circumstances such as rising costs, mental-health struggles, lack of academic preparation, and life-altering interruptions.
The center will release a report next month discussing the factors associated with why students drop out of college.
