Standardized Persistence Rate for Part-Time Online Adult Learners

Throughout my time working with online adult learners, I've never found a sound or standard way to measure persistence for online adult learners studying part-time (taking 11 or fewer credits per semester). The approaches I have seen range from severely misguided to intentionally disingenuous.

Consider the private university that counts a student as "persisting" if they enroll in at least one online course per calendar year, regardless of how many times they stop out and step back in over the same year. This formula works if you haven't spent much time around adult learners or given much thought to what the word "persistence" actually means. At one course per year averaging three credit hours, even a student transferring in 30 credits would need roughly 30 years to complete a 120-credit-hour bachelor's degree. That's not persistence, but it does serve the university's maddening desire to report flattering numbers.

Then there's the private university that counts a student as persisting as long as they haven't formally requested to stop out. So if a part-time online student at this university remains technically "active" in the system without filing withdrawal paperwork, they are considered on track and persisting toward degree completion. No courses completed this semester? Still persisting. No courses last semester? A student who is enrolled but not enrolling is not moving toward a degree. They're just... there.

These quirky models reveal the serious and consequential gap in how higher education defines and measures success for non-traditional learners, particularly adult learners studying online part-time. A more meaningful persistence metric for these learners should account for credit accumulation over time, the ratio of credits attempted to credits earned, and realistic enrollment benchmarks, perhaps a minimum of six credits per year with consistent semester-over-semester activity. And it must distinguish between students who are slowly but steadily progressing and those who simply haven't filed the paperwork to leave.

There is very likely a validated and reproduceable persistence model for this population that I'm not aware of. But if it does not exist, I'd welcome a conversation with researchers, institutional leaders, accreditors, and adult learning advocates to consider how best to build one together. Adult learners deserve metrics that reflect their reality, not definitions invented by people unfamiliar or unconcerned with that reality to begin with.

Random Thought About Higher Ed Leadership

Before coming to higher education, I worked for two successful tech start ups. One thing I learned from both of those companies is that when your organization enters a challenging financial cycle, you need to double-down on the staff who are actually capable of innovating and producing. Over my 25+ plus years in higher education (and particularly the last decade), I've seen too many universities do the exact opposite and hire administrative types who have a paper trail that makes them look like they're good fixing things, but lack the ability or track record of actually fixing or producing anything. 

I've seen this insidiousness most glaringly in higher ed's drunken dependency on consultants. Raise your hand if you've seen a university start losing enrollment, then watch their first decision to hire a consultant. After hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of interviewing the people within the university who actually know what wrong and how to best address the challenges, you get a report with a lot of quadrants in it. Every time, without fail, the report recommends things you already knew. And then it's truly bizarre when these universities, apparently delighted by the experience of paying for advice they could have gotten from their own hallways, decide the logical next step is to hire the consultant full time. The quadrant-maker becomes the SVP of Somethingfancysoundign, which is always a title and position that never existed before, but is somehow desperately needed. 

What follows is entirely predictable. Tired, stale and uninspiring vocabulary, and a remarkable talent for scheduling meetings in which they talk. Just talk. And it's the talking that turns out to be the only performance review that matters. They speak fluently in frameworks. They're so comfortable with uncertainty, which is consultant-speak for not being accountable for outcomes. Meanwhile the people who actually understand the university (the staff who've watched the same problems compound for decades), are asked to align with a pile of gobbledygook passed off as a vision. It's not just that these hires don't fix anything, it's that their presence actively displaces the institutional knowledge and relational trust that real recovery depends on. 

Today, it seems like the years spend hiring people with scant ability to actually lead is most detrimental to mid-tier tuition dependent private universities reeling from enrollment declines and spiraling deficits. Of course, there's not a lot to be done, but a good place to start is to stop rewarding activity and start demanding outcomes. This means putting enrollment trends, retention rates, net tuition revenue, and student completion data on the table alongside a direct conversation about whether current leadership is actually moving those numbers. A lot of people are capable of talking about how they "plan" to move them. Few (it seems) are capable of actually moving them. If the plans these universities have bought into aren't tracking after two or three years, they have a leadership problem, not an execution problem. The mid-tier privates that survive the next decade won't be the ones that hired the impressive-sounding salesman or commissioned the glossy strategic plan. They'll be the ones whose senior leadership and boards finally start asking if the individuals they hired to address the headwinds and exigencies are genuinely capable of leading an educational institution, or are they just very good at PowerPoint and talking?

The Veteran's Cost Of Attendance Barrier

There's a lot of mid-tier universities that love to call themselves "veteran friendly." It's a thing that's irked me for years. Now there's a new Pew report that exposes what "veteran friendly" means in most cases (it's disingenuous at best) and looks like in practice (it's not a flattering image). 

Pew found that despite the Post-9/11 GI Bill being one of the most substantial education benefits the federal government has ever offered, roughly one in five veterans are still taking out private lender loans after separating from service, borrowing an average of $22,597 over the first four years of their post-military transitions. The data raises the question, if the GI Bill is so robust, why are veterans going into debt to use it? An analysis of the data reveals that the debt isn't incurred to cover tuition, it's used to pay for living expenses, especially housing. And this is the part that private universities (particularly tuition-dependent privates) are challenged to talk about.

The GI Bill includes a monthly housing allowance, but that allowance covers half or less of actual housing costs for nearly 40% of veterans taking out personal loans. The allowance simply doesn't cover what housing actually costs. Private universities know what the GI Bill's annual cap is for their institutions. They know what the housing allowance is in their region and city. And nearly all of them willingly capture the tuition dollars, call it "friendly" and leave the rest up to the veteran to figure out.

The bolder and more impactful thing for these universities to do is create a cost structure for veterans based on the total cost of attendance. This means full transparency about the gap between the GI Bill's housing allowance and local housing rates, and then cover the delta with intuitional aid that doesn't compromise the veteran's tuition benefits. They can do this by creating a dedicated veteran housing subsidy fund, supported by alumni giving and institutional budget commitments, that fills the gap between what the GI Bill housing allowance covers and what housing actually costs near campus. Like most solutions in higher ed, this wouldn't require millions of dollars. Even modest, targeted grants covering a few hundred dollars a month in housing costs would keep veterans away from private lenders entirely. Then, double-down on your commitment to veterans and pair the housing subsidy with a progressive model for verifying completed professional military education, awarding stackable credentials that represent that learning, and combining those credentials with a small amount of targeted coursework to earn a university recognized certificate. If a veteran's military training translates into real academic credit, that's fewer courses to pay for, fewer months before graduation, and less time running up against the GI Bill's 36 month enrollment limit, which Pew also identifies as a significant driver of veteran borrowing.

Again, none of this is hard or complicated, but it does require executive leadership to walk the talk and not shrink behind the looming enrollment crises while keeping a death grip on a decaying business model.

Time To Play Catch Up

I've been paying a lot of attention to the hand-wringing in higher education and noticed that some progressive universities seem genuinely excited about reinventing themselves. Lot's of pronouncements about non-credit credential, accelerated degrees, eight-week terms, and partnerships with employers. Not surprising (a least not to some of us), these are the universities that are picking up the playbook that professional continuing education (PCE) units have been running, with varying levels of success, for decades. The irony here is that PCE divisions weren't sitting around waiting for a demographic cliff or a federal earnings test to start asking hard questions about relevance. They've been continually evolving because their students have always demanded outcomes, not credit hours. The best PCE units have already built the stackable credentials, industry partnerships, and flexible scheduling that some university administers are now fawning over.

Progressive universities are giving their PCE units more room to move faster, price flexibly, and freedom to rapidly build programs in weeks instead of years. They are compressing time to degree, embedding microcredentials, and rethinking the academic calendar itself. These are the things that PCE units have been doing since before "workforce alignment" was a buzzword.  PCE units are a living proof of concept sitting right inside the institution. The universities smart enough to treat them as a resource and replicable model rather than a margin item on the expense report have a significant head start. The rest will spend the next decade rediscovering what their PCE colleagues figured out years ago, then call it innovation.

The Online Enrollment Playbook Isn't Working

I was speaking with a colleague about the current financial crises in higher education and he reminded me the credit rating agencies saw this coming, but few universities had the will to pull their heads out of the sand. When we go back to the data, we find that while traditional freshman enrollment dropped 5% in fall 2024, non-traditional adult undergraduate students grew by ~19% percent in the same period. Adult learners are now the single clearest growth opportunity in higher education, but most universities are bumbling through the opportunity in embarrassing fashion.

IMHO, the core problem is that universities have enrollment operations built on (perceived) brand prestige and campus-based experiences. When these universities suggest, but fail to embrace, that online undergraduate enrollment is a financial priority, they are re-glossing the existing playbook and applying it to a completely different kind of student. And when the online enrollment targets are missed, the dominant institutional response is to spend more on brand awareness campaigns and digital marketing. It's sort of like that restaurant with perpetually empty tables that just put up a bigger sign out front.

Many of us have lived through the OPM collapse. Remember how loudly and passionately our senior leadership complained about our OPM contracts being short on accountability? Yet now, as our online programs are being brought back in-house, that same leadership is sheepishly unwilling to build the internal accountability structures they had ranted about under our contracts. What they settle for and pass off as strategy is declared independence and internal online enrollment operations churning out the same vague metrics and wishful projections that made the OPM relationship so frustrating to begin with. Too many universities are making this mistake at a time when accountability, agility and creativity are needed most.

As I've suggested before, the fix isn't complicated. Be bold enough and willing to stop marketing the brand and start marketing the programs. Build realistic enrollment windows that fit how adult students actually make decisions. Hire advisors who proactively reach out rather than waiting for students to find them. Measure what matters and hold someone accountable for the missed numbers. Really, it's that easy.

Trying to Get Adult Student Support Right

There is a great article in Inside Higher Ed about how the Colleges of Law in California is supporting its adult students. The college serves a student body where the average age is 36 and the majority of students attend part-time. They've redesigned their support services around the realities of their students' lives, and the model needs to be considered by any university salivating over the adult learner market. 

The college recognized it wasn't fair or realistic to hand part-time students a 10-week Bar Prep program and expect them to simply drop their jobs and family obligations for the duration. So they changed the program, expanded existing one-on-one coaching, and added in-person simulations. They also actively engaged students in conversations about whether the timing was right for them to attempt the exam. The college had already established an environment in which an advisor can tell a student, without embarrassment, "this isn't the right time for you." That takes staff who are trained for adult learners, policies that create room for those conversations, and an institutional culture that treats adult students as partners rather than problems.

Tuition-dependent universities who are experiencing significant declines in traditional full-time enrollments are eyeing online and on-campus adult learners as a stop-gap. Enrollment projections look compelling on a slide deck. But when the adult learner, who works full-time, is raising a family, and is committing real money and irreplaceable time to earn a credential, arrives on day one they find a system built entirely for someone else. The advising office closes at 4:30 p.m. The financial aid forms assume a 22-year-old dependent. The academic calendar has no accommodation for the fact that "spring break" means nothing to a 38-year-old and the student services staff have been trained to support 18-22 year-olds. 

The lesson from the Colleges of Law is that you have to first know the students you serve, then design every support system around them. Train your staff accordingly and build a culture of candor rather than performance. If universities are serious about serving adult learners, and not merely enrolling them, they have make a genuine commitment, apply meaningful resources, and admit that the old playbook does not work.

Cutting Programs Isn't a Strategy

Southern Oregon University unveiled a plan to sunset or consolidate 13 academic units, including music, creative writing, and gender studies, while outsourcing a wide range of administrative functions. The plan grew out of a Deloitte analysis (we so love our consultants in higher ed) and was primarily driven by their non-contextualized simplified math that ten academic units were operating at a loss, and the three largest programs accounted for 45% of enrollment. Not at all surprising, the SOU community pushed back and the faculty questioned the data (as they should!). They warned that making workforce alignment the university's "driving goal" would narrow SOU's role and subordinate its contributions to civic and cultural life. And they weren't exactly wrong there, but it's the dimension of SOU's plan that I believe is a little more nuanced than a consultant is capable of explaining to already skeptical faculty.

The way this plays out at most universities is a false equivalency between workforce alignment and the liberal arts. The way consultants see it (and the way universities are increasingly learning they need to see it) is a question of revenue. SOU is a regional public university in a state that ranks near the bottom in per-student higher education funding. Cutting programs that lose money is an understandable response to that reality. But it's a retreat, not a solution. The exact same logic is playing out right now at mid-tier tuition-dependent private universities across the country. Schools like Hampshire College, which recently announced closure, and dozens of others trimming programs and laying off staff, are running the same uninspired playbook designed to protect the high-enrollment programs, cut the low-enrollment ones and staff headcounts, then hope the math works out. It never does because the problem isn't cost, it's revenue.

A bolder plan recognizes that most of these universities already have an underutilized asset sitting inside them. Schools and divisions of professional and continuing education (PCE units) operate under the fundamentally different financial logic that requires them to be self-sustaining, responsive to employer demand, and capable of generating margins that cross-subsidize the rest of the institution. At universities considering the decaying playbook plan, a PCE-centered strategy means you're not abandoning music or creative writing, you're extending them with workforce-focused credentials like creative economy entrepreneurship programs or community arts management certifications. Virtually every traditional discipline already contains a workforce-aligned version of itself waiting to be unlocked. Philosophy serves ethics consulting, theater translates into executive communication training, sociology is applied to UX research, and education amplifies corporate learning design. PCE is the vehicle for these progressive applications of existing programs and faculty expertise, but most universities lack the internal incentives and structural bridges to unleash their PCE units, open new revenue streams without gutting faculty lines and staff positions, and do it without abandoning the university's cultural mission.