Why Adult Learner Enrollment Strategies Fail

A new Milken Institute report, covered in Inside Higher Ed, makes the simple but significant point that adult learners are consistently shut out of most state-funded free tuition program, even though they're the students facing the steepest financial odds against finishing a degree. Meanwhile, we're watching with a bit of awe and much dismay as mid-tier tuition dependent private universities reeling from traditional enrollment declines turn their all-seeing-eyes toward the millions of adults without a degree. But as I've suggested before, the failure these universities will experience is embedded in their uninformed and comically outdated strategies to attract adult learners, specifically to their online undergraduate programs. The failure starts when they buy into the marketing and sales gobbledygook and commit to ambitious and unrealistic five year plans for online adult enrollment growth. All of these plans attempt to leverage "our amazing brand" and the convenience of online learning, but fail to address price, which is always the most critical variable for adult learners. You can claim to offer flexibility and access to a well-branded degree, but when the adult student needs to choose between your discounted-but-still-substantial tuition and an increasingly available free public alternative, your enrollment plan fails catestrophically.

A better strategy for these universities is to restructure the economics with real tuition guarantees that cap or freeze cost for adult completers. Add stackable credentials into the degree plans. Secure employer tuition partnerships that put up external funding and align curriculum to actual industry needs. Again, none of this is hard (it really isn't), but the easier path for so many mid-tier tuition-dependent privates is to pretend convenience and their brands are substitutes for cost relief. That easy path ends with a failed strategic plan full of unfilled revenue goals and sadly humorous adult learner enrollment targets.

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 taken last semester or completed this semester? Still persisting, and that's utterly ridiculous. A student who is enrolled but not enrolling is not moving toward a degree. They're just... there.

These poorly constructed 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 at 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's 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 staff and faculty, decide the logical next step is to hire the consultant full time. The quadrant-maker becomes the SVP of Somethingfancysounding, 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 spent 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.

No, Universities Aren't Dead

There's a brief but informative post on LinkedIn that reminded me of a paper I submitted as part of my doctoral course work that presented the university (writ large) as a business. As such, the goal of the university is to make enough money to sustain itself and ensure its persistence. The paper wasn't well received by my professor, but I believe the claims remain valid and perhaps more relevant today than they were 20 years ago.

Universities are painfully slow, particularly mid-tier private universities that so often struggle to release themselves from archaic thinking and practices. Some degree programs are laughably outdated, despite efforts to pause, combine or close those that are woefully under-enrolled. Tuition at many of these universities has reached genuinely absurd levels. And while a 22-year-old today can learn just about anything from YouTube and earn a Google tech certificate in six months, there are still ~20 million students enrolled in higher education in the US. That number flies in the face of the echoing warnings from the likes of Clayton Christensen toward the end of the last century that universities in the US were going the way of printed newspapers. 

What Christensen and other higher ed futurists failed to account for is the way in which some progressive universities are able to thrive simply by not defending the status quo. These are the universities that have experimented with, explored and adapted to "disruptors" like MOOCs, bootcamps, and ChatGPT. They're the universities that have discovered they can offer the contexts and experiences that the internet can't. And not surprising (at least not to me) is that the smartest of those universities realized those discoveries first in their professional continuing education (PCE) divisions. When supported and funded appropriately, PCE units serve as the most strategically important part of the modern university. They are the one academic unit on campus that designs programming around employer demand, not 400-year old disciplinary boundaries. They iterate on curriculum constantly and operate closer to market speed than any other part of the university. 

Any platform can stream a lecture. That's the ubiquity of content delivery that Christensen fixated on. What a university's PCE unit does is to stake institutional credibility on the outcome of that content. Not in a 120 credit hour degree, but in credentials that have demonstrable value because they are immediately applicable and carry the universities credibility and reputation. An AI tutor can teach machine learning concepts beautifully. It can't yet satisfy a state licensing board or signal to an HR department that a candidate has been rigorously assessed by qualified practitioners. 

And this is exactly what the LinkedIn post gets right. Change doesn't kill universities, but refusing to change does. PCE units are not proofs of concept. They've been doing the hard work of rapid reinvention for decades while the rest of the university slugs along. They're building partnerships with regional employers. They're designing short, stackable credentials that connect into degree pathways for students who want them. The universities that'll still matter in twenty years will be the ones betting on the parts of the institution that have already proven they can evolve.

Online Adult Learners Aren't A Rescue Plan

There's an exceptional article in the Chronicle this morning. It alludes to the conversations happening in cabinet meetings at tuition-dependent institutions across the country. A few of these conversations are going something like this: "We're losing traditional student enrollments. What if we launched online programs for adult learners?" Everyone nods and there's a suggestion of some faculty who've always wanted to offer that one special undergraduate program online. Someone pulls up a slide about the 36 million Americans with some college and no degree, and the decision is made before anyone asks if the market actually wants what the university is selling.

The enthusiasm in those meetings is real and the logic is seductive. Yet, as the Chronicle piece suggests, chasing headcounts isn't sustainable, even when you hedge your full-time on campus losses with part-time online enrollments. It's a hard message to hear for institutions wired to measure success with headcounts. What gets missed in the drunken fervor of online enrollment projections is the fact that the online space is no longer a wide-open market. It's now the most competitive and price-sensitive sector in higher education. WGU, SNHU, Purdue Global, and other mega universities have built the infrastructure adult learners need, including student support, and they're offering their programs at market-sensitive price points. The mistake too many universities are making now is launching online adult-learner programs built around programs they already have, not around what the market wants and isn't already getting somewhere else for less money.

Online adult learners don't fill residence halls or subsidize athletics. The fixed-cost infrastructure built for residential students doesn't shrink just because you've added online enrollments. Net revenue has to work really hard, and at institutions newish to the online market, it usually doesn't work at all. Online programs can drive positive net revenues when the university commits seriously and starts with genuine market intelligence rather than external fawning about the "power of your brand" and pretty slides with big numbers. What online programs can't do for the majority of universities is rescue them from full-time enrollment losses.

The Need to Recognize Military Training Now

Here's a problem that isn't getting the attention it deserves. A staff sergeant with 10 years of service, separates from the military and interviews for her first post-military job. She's built and led teams under pressure, and managed million-dollar equipment, but she doesn't have an undergraduate degree. What she has presented to the prospective employer is a professional transcript listed rigorous technical training and professional education courses. To the staff sergeant, she's captured completely the skills, competencies and knowledge she's developed during her time in service. To the prospective employer, she's presented a list of course titles and acronyms that don't map to the job description. 

The problem here is translating military technical training and professional military education (PME) into something that makes sense to civilian employers. The vast majority of employers understand that the military invests enormously in developing its people. PME schools like NCO academies, Command and Staff Colleges, and War Colleges produce genuinely sophisticated leaders and technical specialists. The problem is that most of this training exists in a credentialing ecosystem that civilians don't recognize, can't read, and haven't bothered to figure out.

So imagine if a progressive university were to develop a model for verifying a service member's completed PME, award stackable credentials (digital badges) that represent that learning, and combine those badges with a small amount of targeted coursework to earn a university-recognized certificate. This isn't hard or complicated, we just have to have someone do it. 

The broader opportunity here for the first-mover university is found in the millions of prior service members cycling through the civilian workforce every year carrying knowledge, skills, and competencies they can't easily articulate. There's no shortage of civilian frameworks for this, but higher education's willingness to do the mapping work has been abysmally slow, inconsistent, and confined to a handful of public universities. This is where private universities need to step up. The workforce transition problem for veterans isn't getting smaller. And frankly, private universities that figure this out first are going to attract a highly motivated, experienced student population that's chronically underserved.

The model can be readily implemented with the right unit (ideally a PCE/O school or college). The institution simply needs to demonstrate a commitment to evaluating existing military training on its merits, implementing a stable and scalable digital badging infrastructure, and identifying a set of bridging courses. Really, it's that simple.

687 Universities Walk Into a Bar...

There's a particular kind of institutional irony that higher ed can pull off with a straight face. Universities with long histories and genuine reputations for innovation are weighing whether they need the very thing that 687 other universities have decided they cannot do without. 

Six hundred and eighty-seven universities in the US have a school or college dedicated to professional and continuing education (PCE). This isn't a fringe movement (some of these units have been around since the early years of the last century), and these aren't mid-tier universities hedging their bets on adult learners. The list includes Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, Northeastern, Northwestern, NYU, and Boston University; universities that actually see the landscape of American higher education and understand that the traditional model, built for 18 to 22 year olds attending full-time and sitting in classrooms, is not sustainable.

The case for maintaining a well-funded and agile PCE unit should be obvious. Working adults are increasingly looking to higher education for career specific skills and competencies. Traditional age students are demanding flexible and accessible part-time pathways. Employers want to hire people with credentials that are relevant and immediately applied. None of that fits into the traditional model.

The broader point is actually a simple one. Higher ed is changing and the universities best positioned to survive that change are the ones that figure out how to serve more than one kind of student. The universities that defund and devalue their PCE schools and colleges, while their peers are actively expanding their units, will be performing a genuinely impressive act of self-defeat.

Higher Ed's Value Problem

The question of the value of higher education is surfacing a lot lately. We watched the confidence in colleges and universities erode over the last 25 years, and now it's showing up in enrollment decisions and in the way families weigh tuition costs against outcomes. We're also seeing it play out in the growing number of students who are stepping left of traditional degree programs in favor of bootcamps, certifications, and self-directed learning. I believe this is where schools and colleges of professional studies have a real opportunity to lead. 

Students who attend professional studies schools and colleges are not following a default path. They are working adults who have chosen to invest their time, money, and energy into education while managing careers and families. They are, in a very practical sense, the ultimate test case for whether higher ed delivers on its promise. Professional studies programs already sit on a foundation of longitudinal relationships with graduates and tracking outcomes to build a clearer picture of where professional education creates lasting career impact. To replicate this across the university, you'd need to deepen employer partnerships to include actual curriculum conversations, so programs stay tightly connected to what the workforce values and needs. It could also mean developing new frameworks for communicating student outcomes in ways that are meaningful and accessible to prospective learners making real financial decisions.

This approach to answering the value question is one of the significant strengths of professional studies schools and colleges. PCE/O units have always been oriented around relevance and practical impact. Turning that experience and practice toward the question of value is a natural next step, and one with enormous potential upside. Universities that can point to rigorous, transparent evidence of their outcomes will stand apart in an increasingly competitive landscape. The opportunity here is to help higher education move from defending its value to demonstrating it.

"Designed for Adult Learners" Is a Silly Claim

I've been browsing university websites for online undergraduate programs and have come across more than a few times a claim like this: our programs are designed with the adult learner in mind. Compelling, but I think kind of silly at the same time. 

The concept of andragogy, Malcolm Knowles' framework for how adults learn differently than children, does offer useful principles that should be considered by any university expecting to enroll adults in its online programs. And an instructional designer who approaches their work with those principles in mind is doing better work for you than one who doesn't. But the silliness emerges when we acknowledge that instructional designers don't actually design programs. They design courses within programs, and those programs live inside institutional structures that were built for 18-22 year old students. Credit hours, prerequisites, gen ed cores... it's all baked in long before an ID touches the content. I've seen IDs conceptualize beautifully andragogic learning activities only to watch a faculty member replace them with a timed quiz because that's what they've always done. And even if a designer gets everything right, the majority of adult learners don't arrive ready for the kind of autonomous, self-directed learning that andragogy assumes. They often need more scaffolding, not less. Designing purely for autonomy fails these students just as badly as treating them like passive recipients.

A more defensible framing is to suggest that a well-designed online undergraduate program can be more andragogically informed than a traditional one. It can offer meaningful choices, connect content to real-world problems, explain the "why" transparently, and validate what learners already know. That's genuinely valuable, but it's not the same as claiming the program was designed for adult learners as if andragogy has been fully implemented end to end. When a university makes that claim, it's being more than slightly disingenuous. Adult students who enroll on the basis of that promise and then encounter rigid structures, irrelevant assessments, and no flexibility will notice the gap quickly. That will breed frustration and attrition.

Universities need to be telling prospective adult students that they've built flexible pacing, problem-based projects, transparent learning rationale, and opportunities to connect coursework to their own professional experience. Vague promises about being designed for adults sound good in a brochure and briefings to the board, but they set an expectation the institution almost certainly can't meet.

The ADA Blind Spot in Higher Ed

A recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece explores the increasing number of students claiming to have disabilities and if the number is reflective of real disabilities. According to the article, the proportion of colleges where more than 10 percent of students are registered as disabled has quintupled in a decade. At schools like Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are now registered as disabled, and at Amherst it's 34 percent. The causes, conditions and validity of the increase should continue be explored, but I'll suggest that we expand the conversation to include the staff and faculty who consistently under-claim the accommodations they're legally entitled to.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the disability rate among U.S. workers at roughly 19 percent. Faculty and staff on any campus in the US are covered under Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations unless doing so creates undue hardship. But according to EDUCAUSE research, faculty at major research universities report disabilities at rates of just 1.5 to 4 percent and some private universities put that number even lower. Campus employees are as likely to have disabilities as anyone else in the workforce, but where students face relatively little social stigma for disclosing a disability, faculty and staff face career risks, as disclosure can feel like painting a target on yourself. Pre-tenure faculty worry that asking for an accommodation signals they can't keep up with their colleagues. Adjuncts, who already lack job security, don't raise the issue at all. Professional staff, including advisors, coordinators, and program managers, know their positions are frequently at-will or on renewable contracts.

The more troubling issue we should be talking about is the documented recurring pattern of employees on our campuses with ADA accommodations whose positions are being eliminated due to "reorganization." The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has held explicitly that using disability-related accommodations as a factor in reduction-in-force decisions constitutes illegal retaliation. But proving it is hard, and most employees don't try. In higher education, where budget pressures are making reorganizations routine, staff and faculty who've formalized an accommodation become visible in a way they weren't before. When the next round of cuts comes, institutions point to a legitimate-sounding budget rationale. 

Using a reorganization as cover for disability discrimination is illegal, yet no one in higher ed is talking about it. As we ask whether too many of our students are registered as disabled, it's imperative to start asking ourselves why our staff and faculty are remaining silent about their disabilities.

Jane Eyre And Leadership

There's a pattern in academic leadership that I've seen before and have been watching closely these last few months. It begins with the individual who enters the university carrying the language of trust and what is presented as a genuine conviction to creating the best type of human connections so important in successful organizations. They speak passionately about fairness, equity and what universities owe to the staff they so often exploit and fail. They build a reputation on this performance and language and wear it like a badge.

I re-read Jane Eyre a few years ago and now find myself coming back to the character St. John Rivers and the deception of careful performance and intentional language. Rivers is outwardly selfless and adamant in his conviction to create more trust in the world, but every relationship he has is shaped by his self-interest. He doesn't shout or threaten, he simply withdraws when people fail to comply, and he does it with this sort of serene certainty that the withdrawal presents like an inspired form of leadership. That's the texture I recognize in this corrosive leadership pattern. As the individual accumulates institutional authority, a title, then a seat at the table (but not the adult table), the values they flaunt so publicly stop being the things they serve and become the justification for their authority. The mission serves as their mask and professional collegiality becomes transactionally conditional or disappears without explanation.

What makes this hard for me to confront, and what I think Bronte understood about Rivers, is that the self-deception is total. The individual genuinely experiences themselves as selfless and burdened by a mission others lack the courage to pursue. Every act of self-interest gets internalized as sacrifice. And this is what makes the people around them feel faintly crazy. The people who come to such a leader, genuinely hoping to be led somewhere better, are inevitably disappointed. Some leave the institution. Some stay and learn to be more careful.

Universities need structures that don't solely depend on the character of leaders, because even genuine character isn't stable under pressure and the accumulation of power. The language of social good isn't inoculation against self-interest and self-preservation. And the leaders who are hardest to hold accountable are usually the ones most fluent in the language of accountability.

Adult Enrollment Trap

There are quite a few private universities betting on adult learners to solve their enrollment problems. CAEL just released a report that can help revise their aspirational growth plans. Not surprising, the report notes that cost is the most frequently cited barrier to enrollment. Telling prospective adult learners that a fully online undergraduate degree costs $80,000-90,000 has never been  good marketing copy. The adults most motivated to enroll have long been those least able to meet the price point. Counting on yielding even a nominal number of the 65 million prospective adult learners while ignoring what they can actually afford will be a catastrophic fail for these universities.

Beyond cost, the CAEL report highlights the rapidly increasing demand among adult learners for shorter-term, workforce-aligned pathways. These are the learners telling us they want credentials tied to careers without the overhead of a traditional degree structure. Private universities offering conventional four-year online degrees at premium prices are solving the wrong problem for a growing share of this market. The worst online growth plans are also failing to adequately address credit for prior learning. Adult learners come to us with decades of work history, industry credentials, and military service that directly overlaps with degree requirements. Yet many private universities continue to impose cumbersome credit for prior learning policies and processes. For a population that's primarily motivated by career advancement and skill development, being forced to re-learn what they already know and pay for the privilege is a pretty compelling reason to walk down the street to the accessible, flexible and affordable public university.

Private universities have a genuine opportunity here, but only if they're willing to be honest about what the adult learner market requires. Affordability, time flexibility, and recognition of prior learning are the core of the value proposition for this market. Universities counting on adult enrollment to offset demographic decline, while maintaining traditional-age pricing and rigid credit policies, are going to find that intent doesn't convert to enrollment, and enrollment doesn't convert to completion. The data supports urgency and a serious rethinking of whether current program designs were built for the students these institutions claim to want to serve.

When Strategic Assets Get Ignored

Ray Schroeder's latest Inside Higher Ed column deserves to land harder than it probably will at most private universities. I've known and admired Ray for years. His guidance and perspectives as a Senior Fellow with UPCEA are invaluable to those of us operating in the PCE space. 

In this article, Ray suggests that professional and continuing education was once the least-respected unit on campus, but that it's now poised to be the most essential. Ray's argument is built on the reality that rapidly expanding technologies, such as AI, are dismantling the foundational premise of the traditional college degree. The adult learners navigating this upheaval need what well-resourced professional and continuing education (PCE) colleges deliver. And yet most mid-tier tuition-dependent private universities are still under-leveraging and under-funding their PCE units.

The structural case for PCE colleges is fundamental and operational. Traditional schools and colleges cannot serve adult learners, career changers, and working professionals effectively because their governance structures, disciplinary boundaries, and cultural assumptions make rapid innovation nearly impossible. Take, for example, the Bachelor of Professional Studies model which is built on 75% professionally focused credits, credit for prior learning, and direct alignment to career outcomes. A degree structured this way can't be delivered through a traditional school or college that guards its course distribution requirements or claims ownership of the major credits. Only a dedicated unit, free from disciplinary nonsense, can respond to labor market changes at competitive speed, and maintain the institutional infrastructure for microcredentials, corporate billing, non-matriculated registration, and digital badging that the workforce education market now demands. 

The PCE college is the only academic unit on most campuses that's architecturally designed to do this work. Some private universities get it. Some don't. Those that have systematically underfunded, misunderstood, or organizationally sidelined their PCE colleges typically do so as an act of preserving some noble vision of higher education. Their senior leaders are desperately white-knuckling the stick on a rapidly shortening runway, refusing to resource the one unit capable of keeping their institutions relevant as the world Ray describes accelerates around them. 

The demographic cliff has been getting all the attention. The competency cliff doesn't. The workforce that needs continuous reskilling is now a permanent condition. Georgetown already knows this. Northeastern already knows this. Northwestern already knows this. The private universities still treating their PCE college like a satellite campus for non-traditional part-time students will figure it out around the same time they're explaining to their board why eighteen-year-old applications are down again and nothing they've tried is working.

The Call Out

Try sitting with Gordon Gee's words for a few minutes, particularly the ones where he says our universities are isolated and arrogant. You might find yourself feeling a bit uncomfortable because the isolation he describes isn't just an Ivy League problem or a flagship state university problem, it's prolific in the mid-tier space too.

Gee says that almost every university in this country is carrying a structural deficit and we just haven't been willing to admit it. That stings in a particular way when you are tuition-dependent and your online growth strategy was supposed to be the answer to the downward financial pressures. When the projections miss by 100 percent, you can't simply and quietly reforecast and move on. You will be forced to determine if the problem was execution, pricing, program design, or something deeper. I'm going to suggest it's all of those, even the something deeper.

I've never been a fan of it, but this is a situation where we would benefit from looking into the rearview mirror. For tuition-dependent mid-tier private universities, the missed projections are going to be painful, but oddly clarifying. They'll say something real about what our universities are and what they are not. 

The mid-tier privates that survive the next decade won't be the ones that planned the best. They'll be the ones that listened the hardest and were brutally honest with themselves when they had to be.

Calbright's Crisis And Online Ambitions

Raise your hand if you been in this situation... You're in a conference room with senior leadership. Someone puts up a slide showing projected online undergraduate enrollment that looks something like a hockey stick curving upward by year five. Heads in the room nod along because the alternative (admitting that the numbers are aspirational at best) is too uncomfortable to say out loud. 

This is why the story unfolding at Calbright College should give us all pause. Calbright was launched as California's all-online community college in 2019 as one of the most progressive initiatives in higher education designed specifically for adult learners. But despite $100 million in one-time startup funds and years of ongoing state support, enrollment hasn't reached a scale that justifies the cost structure. The cautionary tale for private universities that are banking on the adult learner market to grow their online enrollments is that Calbright's programs are tuition-free. Their programs are free to California residents and they still can't hit their enroll targets. And yet, private universities continue to draw up online growth plans that assume they can outperform what a state-backed institution offering tuition-free education cant' pull off.

The cost reality is where this should get uncomfortable for those senior leaders in that conference room following the marketing bluster like lost sheep. Calbright's model ran at roughly $50 million a year to serve around 7,000 students, or about $7,000 per enrolled student annually. The online undergraduate programs I'm familiar with at mid-tier private universities carry per-student delivery costs that are typically double that figure. Calbright's enrollment growth, while genuine, came only after years of underperformance and a significant redesign of programs based on what students said wasn't working. You don't get that kind of second chance at a tuition-dependent mid-tier private. When enrollment projections fall short and the tuition revenue doesn't materialize there's just the shortfall and a hard conversation with the board.

Moving Fast Requires Moving Fast

I've spent enough time watching private universities chase the alternative credential market to know that most of them are going about it the wrong way. It's a humble opinion, but the data bears it out, and so does the pattern of organizational decision making we see repeated day after day.

EAB has another great market study suggesting that even private universities with exceedingly strong brands (Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc.) are struggling to solve the alternative credential puzzle. So when a mid-sized private university with an underfunded continuing education unit and an 18-month curriculum approval process decides it's going to capture meaningful revenue from alternative credentials, we should be honest about the projected outcomes. The study reveals that most institutions are reporting ~$200,000 annually in revenues from alternative credentials. Professional certificates perform best. This isn't the result of a soft market. I've seen some studies projecting the US alternative credentials market to reach $118.8 billion by 2035, growing at a rapid ~18% annual rate. I'm suggesting that universities (specifically mid-sized privates) have underperforming alternative credential programs because the market has no tolerance for institutional inertia. What we're seeing in the alternative credentialling space is a need for speed, market intelligence, and employer relationships. Those are three characteristics you're hard pressed to locate within most private universities.

More than a few of these schools have permitted their alternative credential initiatives to creep back into the hands of traditional faculty. In most cases, this happens because institutional leadership is conflict-averse about asserting different models. In other cases, it's the product of faculty governance structures that make it impossible to locate alternative credentialling outside a traditional school or college. I've seen the abysmal failure of trying to repackage traditional programs as alternatives credentials. The working adults looking to reskill in six weeks aren't interested in a shortened version of a semester-long graduate seminar. They need something that produces demonstrable skills and competencies that employers recognize and reward. Meanwhile, the professional and continuing education units that actually have the market intelligence, the employer relationships, the adult learner experience, and the operational agility to compete in this space are kept at arm's length from strategic decisions and operationalizing market-sensitive alternative credential programs.

The private universities that are genuinely successful in the alternative credential space are centralizing alternative credential development within the PCE units (or similar schools and colleges). They're designing programs up from adult learner and employer needs, not down from existing curriculum. They're building stackability into their offerings so that a credential creates an optional pathway toward a degree, not requiring it as a gateway to enrolling. And most critically, they're pricing their credentials in ways that reflect what the market expects, not what their budget offices think they should.

The alternative credential opportunity is real, but it requires the right organizational conditions to generate value. For private universities that have been hesitant to let their PCE units lead this work, the cost is time and money spent on programs that will continue to underperform. It's also a missed opportunity to keep the institution relevant and competitive in a rapidly evolving higher ed market.

Spell "Adult Learning" Without AI

There's a recent opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed by USC writing professor Patricia Taylor in which she makes claims that students using generative AI to help write are outsourcing the cognitive effort that makes thinking possible and outsourcing the task of writing itself. That's my read of it. She is writing for higher ed broadly, but I keep thinking about what this means for adult learners. 

Taylor pushes back on two popular framings of AI and writing. The first, "writing is just a proxy for thinking," suggests that educators shouldn't worry about AI-generated essays because what we really care about is the thinking behind them. The second, "writing is thinking," argues that writing is so integral to cognition that you can't separate the two. Taylor's counter is that both framings miss the fact that writing isn't thinking itself. Writing is the set of tools humans developed to manage the cognitive load that thinking in language requires. When AI generates that language for a student, it steps in front of a process the student's brain was supposed to do.

This framing resonates with me with an important distinction for adult learners. Consider a 34-year-old healthcare administrator enrolled in an online Bachelor of Professional Studies in Organizational Leadership & Development program. She understands billing and remittance workflows from years in professional administrative roles. What she's less sure about is how to frame that knowledge in an academic policy analysis. Using AI to translate her professional fluency into a paper isn't the same as outsourcing her thinking. The thinking starts with her experience. AI is helping her get it onto the page in the generic academic form her professor expects. Same idea for a BPS in Project Management student who knows Agile inside and out who uses AI to get unstuck on structure, then  steps in with the substance he's already worked through on his own. That feels meaningfully different to me than a student who skips the thinking altogether. 

I also think adults who've spent years in professional environments have already built solid reasoning habits. Their cognition isn't as vulnerable to erosion from AI assistance as that of a 19-year-old still forming those habits. But here's where it gets complicated a bit for me. The same features that make adult learners seem lower-risk can also make them higher-stakes. Adults often return to school to upskill and advance their careers, and BPS curricula are specifically designed to exploit their professional experience. Taylor's caution that the more we outsource language management to AI, the harder we'll find it to manage our own thinking, is real and something we should foreground in our teaching.

I'm not sure "writing as proxy" and "writing as thinking" are as mutually exclusive as they're sometimes framed. For most adult learners, the gap between these two positions is actually kind of normal and maybe something of a buffer for those of us who teach adults. My real discomfort is that AI use often feels like a productivity gain while it's quietly undermining the skills and competencies that a BPS degree is supposed to build.

Slippery Growth Strategies

A lot of tuition-dependent private universities are betting on growth in their online programs, primarily undergraduate programs marketed to adult learners, to hedge against declining full-time residential enrollments. I've spoken with colleagues who struggle to keep a straight face when they describe growth projections of 250% in their online undergraduate programs by 2030. Of course, there's nothing humorous about it, but it's better to have a crazy goal than no goal at all, despite the data that should be giving us pause.

Back in May, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported that first-time college enrollment among adult learners saw its first decline since 2021, down 15.5%. There's a lot of discussion about what's caused the drop and how to counter it. Regardless of what's driving the decline, the implications are increasingly serious for tuition-dependent private institutions with nascent online portfolios. These are the schools with the smallest share of adult learners and they're typically asking those learners to pay more than the bottom-feeder schools and mega online universities. That's a big problem if you're projecting 250% growth in four years.

I don't see this issue as price sensitivity, but I do understand the importance of price to adults learners. I see this more as a market saturation issue. There are now nearly 6,500 schools hawking course-completion credentials not tied to 120 credit-hour degrees. These are the faster, less expensive options increasingly recognized by employers. A small private university that's a few years into its online program hasn't built the brand recognition to compete with the rapidly expanding alternative credential ecosystem. I also think that that adult learners are increasingly delaying full degrees because they're genuinely uncertain what skills will matter in an uncertain and technology-mediated economy. This is the bigger problem for universities who've assumed a steady pipeline of upskilling-motivated adults ready to commit to a multi-year degree.

I'm not suggesting that all online adult learner programs are suspect. But universities that built their five-year plans on 250% online growth need to immediately stress-test those projections against scenarios where they maybe hit 50 or 60 percent of target. When the scenarios trigger financial emergency, quickly rethink whose being recruited. The universities that are actually growing adult enrollment right now aren't doing it through marketing alone. They've made sustained, multi-year investments in outreach, support services, and genuine flexibility. That takes time to build. A private university four or five years into an online UG program and hoping to 2.5x enrollment by 2030 doesn't have a long runway.

Prove You're Different

Every private university with an online undergraduate program is saying that what they do and how they do it is differentiated from the bottom-feeder schools and mega online universities.

Reading through the latest news on Workforce Pell got me thinking about measurable differentiation. To qualify for Workforce Pell dollars, a program must have a 70% completion rate and a 70% job placement rate within 180 days of graduation. If either benchmark is missed, the program loses eligibility. That's a standard private universities have never been asked to meet in any context.

So what if a private university voluntarily applied the Workforce Pell benchmarks to its online undergraduate programs because the institution actually believed what it says about itself? Would it be hard? Ha! Yes, it would be incredibly hard for most. At a minimum you're looking down 2 years of infrastructure and investment before making any program-level claims with confidence. More compelling and necessary, you'd have to actually make the decision to hold yourself accountable to the benchmarks. Some programs wouldn't make the cut. Some administrators would fail brilliantly. Ending the programs and eliminating the positions would require a level of conviction most universities have trouble summoning. 

And maybe that is precisely the point. A university that sets and enforces Workforce Pell-like benchmarks on it's online undergraduate degrees will have done something genuinely unique and differentiated. It will have aligned curriculum designers, career services, faculty, and admissions around unambiguous outcomes. It will have given employers a reason to trust its graduates.

So maybe we just forget differentiation and put our energy into accountability. Imagine what that would do for our mission.

About Online Adult Learners

I’ve been re-reading Edith Hamilton's classic work Mythology. Yesterday, I came across the story of Procrustes, and it got me thinking about online adult learners. Go figure.

Procrustes was an innkeeper who preyed on travelers along the road to Athens. He offered them a bed for the night, but with a significant catch. He had one iron bed, and the condition of staying at his inn was that every guest fit the bed perfectly. Short guests got stretched on the rack. Tall guests were trimmed to fit. Of course, no one who checked into Procrustes' inn ever made it to Athens.

It's a story of misguided hospitality that echoes the approach too many private universities are taking in their support of online adult learners.

We've spent generations in higher education perfecting a model built for 18-to-22-year-old full-time residential students who structure their academic life around a 400-year old agrarian calendar. That model is our iron bed. Then adult learners show up (increasingly more so over the past 10 years) to our online programs. These are the students logging in at 11 p.m., squeezing coursework into lunch breaks, and enrolling part-time because that is the only way they can manage it at all. The typical approach at many private universities to supporting and serving these (non-traditional) students is to call for the rack and saw. 

It always goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: Adult online learners are not a deficient version of  traditional residential students who need a bit of adjusting. They are a different student who brings more professional experience, more genuine motivation, and more at stake their 19-year-old counterparts on campus. And they’re the students who almost never fit the bed.

The interesting part of the Procrustes story for me is that he wasn't evil. He genuinely believed he was offering his patrons a customized service. He had a standard, he applied it fairly, and he was certain that his bed was the right bed. I've survived enough institutional online "strategy" meetings to recognize that type of misguided and dangerous certainty.

If you take time to read the story of Procrustes, you'll find that Theseus eventually comes along and turns Procrustes' method against him. Nothing so dramatic is going to happen at the private universities struggling to figure out how to properly serve their online adult learners. But there is a version of this reckoning already underway, visible in flat enrollment trends and abysmal persistence data, and in the growing number of adult learners quietly choosing the mega-universities that have designed their programs, systems and support specifically for them.

Hybrid Credit

The recent news about the projected growth of the global e-learning market has me thinking about the gap between where non-credit e-learning is headed and what most universities (particularly private universities) are not doing about it.

The e-learning services market is projected to reach $843 billion by 2030, with nearly all of that growth happening outside of degree programs with non-credit corporate training & development. These are the courses from companies like Udemy, Coursera, Khan Academy, and LinkedIn Learning, and they are the platforms where our online part-time adult learners are quietly upskilling themselves while simultaneously toiling through semester-long credit-bearing courses to complete their degrees.

I'm hopeful that we will soon see a progressive university determine how to give real and degree-applicable credit for non-credit e-learning courses completed concurrently with credit-bearing courses. It's the core idea of "credit for current learning" that is getting serious attention from organizations like CAEL and ACE. Most of our institutions do the credit for prior learning thing (PLA) and spend a lot of time talking disingenuously about it in our marketing materials. But where PLA looks in the rearview mirror, credit for current learning runs alongside the learner while they are completing courses within the degree curriculum. In the hybrid credit model adopted by the progressive early-mover university, the student enrolls, starts taking credit-bearing courses and simultaneously completes relevant e-learning courses on an outside platform. At defined checkpoints, the student submits an assessment demonstrating learned skills, knowledge or competencies and how it all maps to degree outcomes and objectives.

A hybrid credit model like this is precisely what working adults taking one or two courses per semester need to stay enrolled and persisting toward degree completion. Many of them have years of professional experience that qualified them for credit for prior learning. What the e-learning market projections tell us is that many of them are likely already using e-learning platforms because the content is good (in some cases, really good) and the price is right (in many cases, free). A hybrid credit model adopted by a progressive university that is willing to operationalize their marketing hype about begin accessible to adult learners would simply be formalizing what their online adult students are already doing by awarding them academic recognition for it.

This wouldn't be hard to mount. You just need the will and right team to do it.

You Can't Scholarship Your Way Out Of The Stop-Out Problem

A few days ago I came across a question posted to an UPCEA discussion board asking what kinds of financial incentives universities are using to improve persistence among online students. It was a reasonable question and the replies have predictably included retention scholarships, tuition discounts, emergency grant funds, and debt forgiveness for returning stop-outs. But re-reading through the thread, I keep thinking that the question asked is actually addressing a much smaller slice of the larger problem that too many private universities with small online profiles have willingly acknowledged.

The larger problem is that adult learners studying part-time enroll differently from traditional students, and they leave differently too. When a 35-year-old stops out mid-semester, the institutional instinct is to reach into the financial aid cash pool, which in many cases is significantly more shallow than it was a few years ago. The impulse is understandable, but it's an egregious misreading of why that student actually left. 

The stop-out pattern among adult learners is driven primarily by life, not cost. And this is the crux of the larger problem. Too often, private universities treat their adult part-time student stop-outs as traditional full-time student dropouts and not as temporary withdrawals. A scholarship doesn't remove all that life is throwing at you when you're trying to complete a degree part-time while working full-time, caring for a family, and "adulting" the best you can. This isn't to suggest that removing financial pressures isn't helpful for adult learners. Scholarships and tuitions discount are always welcome, particularly by the adult students who are self-paying their way through school. But in my experience, most adult learners (I'd suggest ~75% of them) stop-out for reasons that financial aid cannot address. And this is what is missed in the question raised on the discussion board. The solutions and examples offered address just one quarter of the adult learners in that university's online programs.

The harder thing for most private universities to acknowledge is that they're retrofitting traditional student enrollment management and student services approaches to solve for the challenges faced by their online part-time adult learners. The better and more consequential approaches are relational. A scholarship offered after an adult student disengages and stops-out is a low-bar but expensive substitute for the proactive advising and predictive student services programming that might have mattered three weeks earlier, when the pressures of life and degree completion were building and no one noticed.

The institutions gaining ground with online part-time adult learners are not throwing money they can't afford at their students. They've designed and implemented the systems, structures and pathways for these students to leave and, more importantly, easier to come back to. That distinction, which rarely surfaces in conversations about financial incentives, is where we should actually be focused.