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 posed by an embarrassingly under-qualified person hired into an adult learner support role. The replies predictably included retention scholarships, tuition discounts, emergency grant funds, and debt forgiveness for returning stop-outs. Reading through the thread, I kept thinking that the question asked is actually a much smaller part of a larger problem that too many private universities with struggling online portfolios are challenged to acknowledge.

Adult learners studying part-time enroll differently from traditional students, and they leave differently too. Those of us with any meaningful time spent in the professional & continuing education space know this. We also know that when a 35-year-old stops out, the general institutional instinct is to reach into the financial aid pool, which is now significantly more shallow than it was a few years ago. The impulse is understandable, but it's always 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 an online 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 can't address. And this is what is missed in the question raised on the discussion board.

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 (created and sustained by trained advisors, not hack back-office transactional robotic staff). A scholarship offered after an adult student disengages and stops-out is an 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 the AI bot and ill-equipped "advisor" failed to notice.

The institutions gaining ground with online part-time adult learners are not throwing money they can't afford at their students. They've hired the right people with deep experience supporting adult learners.