They're Coming For Your Adult Learners

Generations College, a 122-year-old two-year institution in Chicago, just started offering bachelor's degrees at the same tuition rate, scheduling and modalities as its associate degrees. Increasingly, community colleges across 24 states are doing the same thing. 

Community colleges aren't just nibbling at the edges of the adult learner market anymore. They're building the exact same four-year degree completion pathways that regional privates have spent decades assuming was theirs by default, and they're doing it with lower price points and less student debt. 

Like a broken record (but only because it's so ridiculously obvious), I'll say again that most mid-tier privates already have the internal unit built to aggressively and successfully compete for this market.  Schools and colleges of professional & continuing education (PCEs) have spent decades solving for exactly what Generations College proved by delivering flexible scheduling, non-traditional admissions, employer partnerships, accelerated formats and pricing structures that don't run through the spiraling, self-defeating discount rate strangling the traditional undergraduate side. PCE units can price a program to the market it's actually serving. The main campus, wedded to its sticker price, financial aid formulas and residential cost structures can't. But instead of scaling their PCE units to meet their regional community colleges head-on, some flailing (and failing) private universities are dismantling their PCE units or trying to fold their programs and support services into hack back-office administrative units with no experience or leadership in serving adult and non-traditional learners.

PCE units and community colleges understand that adult and non-traditional learners are looking for a place that understands them, will flex for them and support them, and won't make them start over every time they need to stop-out. Private universities that are truly committed to access and supporting this population of learners all the way through a 4-year degree need to scale their PCE units and staff them with people who actually understand the market, or stand-down anything they're doing that is "non-traditional" and cede the space to the community colleges that are doing it better.