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.