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as I've suggested before, the failure these universities will experience is embedded in their uninformed and comically outdated strategies to attract adult learners, specifically to their online undergraduate programs.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.
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