Five Essential Data Points to Drive Your Adult Learner Strategy
By looking deeper into data, institutions can gain insights into adult learner behaviors, preferences, and barriers.
A list of stopped-out adult learners is far more than just a collection of names, contact information, and terms completed; it’s a puzzle that, when solved, reveals actionable insights that allows colleges and universities to better address the unique needs of adult learners by making data-driven decisions.
By looking deeper into data, institutions can gain insights into adult learner behaviors, preferences, and barriers. Patterns emerge, revealing trends in why these learners disengaged and what might bring them back. This nuanced understanding can drive informed policy recommendations and personalized outreach strategies that support re-engagement.
Here are five essential data points that can transform how you connect with adult learners, support their return, and encourage persistence.
Pipeline
When re-engaging adult learners, it’s important to look beyond simple re-enrollment numbers. Knowing the number of potential re-enrollees in your pipeline who have shown interest, have a motivation to return, and an anticipated timeline to re-enroll is invaluable. This information can help you project the potential for recovered tuition, spot trends, and prompt changes in policies or programs to attract more learners back.
ReUp supplies partner institutions with a breakdown of the numbers within that school’s pipeline, such as the number of credits learners have, their GPA when they left, reasons for leaving, average time out of school, age, and previous majors. This granular level helps institutions tailor their re-engagement strategies much more effectively.
ReUp’s data also gives our partners a holistic view of adult learners that goes beyond academics and dispels persistent myths about this population. For example, about 29% of stopouts in our database of over 1M adult learners have a 3.0 GPA or higher, proving that they are not typically low-performing students. And more than half of adult learners we’ve engaged have indicated a willingness or desire to return, most often to complete a personal goal.
Motivations For Returning
- Personal Goal 48%
- Making a Better Life 18%
- Job Mobility/Promotion 12%
- Career Change 9%
- Earning Potential 9%
- Be a Role Model for Family 2%
- Other 2%
Financial Capacity
Our data shows that cost and financing are the most significant barriers preventing adult learners from returning to college. Analyzing what adult learners talk about during outreach or coaching sessions can give your institution an understanding of their financial capacity. How much are financial considerations holding adult learners back from earning a credential?
For example, ReUp gathers information about adult learners’ financial capacity through multiple interactions and learner-reported information. We discuss this data in aggregate with our partners to recommend small changes that make returning more attractive to adult learners. A recommendation we would make, based on data, might be for a school to consider debt relief under a certain dollar amount for adult learners working with ReUp. Debt relief is often an effective but low-cost strategy to help learners re-enroll.
Other strategies we’ve recommended include:
- Providing a single point of contact to answer financial aid questions and help completing the FAFSA form.
- Establishing an easy way for learners to confirm whether they owe a balance.
- Offering and promoting institutional funding and dedicated scholarships for returning adult learners.
- Eliminating burdensome fees and reducing the cost of course materials.
- Offering more flexible tuition repayment programs.
- Providing financial counseling services.
Programs
Aligning resources with program demand is vital for institutional efficiency and improving the adult learner experience. Having data around the programs and majors chosen by adult learners helps institutions better meet their specific interests and needs, align with industry and workforce trends, and anticipate future educational demands. According to our data, adult learners most often enroll in psychology, business administration, criminal justice, computer science, accounting, pre-health programs, general studies, liberal arts, and interdisciplinary programs that facilitate degree completion.
Institutions can create a more accommodating and supportive learning environment by tracking enrollment trends and adjusting offerings accordingly. Identifying programs with lower completion numbers creates an opportunity to analyze how well they accommodate part-time learners. Is there a program-specific requirement that is creating a bottleneck for learners? A proactive approach can lead to better learner retention and more effective use of institutional resources.
Engagement
ReUp data shows that before re-enrolling, adult learners have an average of 29 touchpoints; after enrollment, that number goes to 35. ReUp supplements our partners’ capacity by dramatically increasing the number of outreach interactions possible. Each interaction contributes to an overall picture of what’s working, what needs to be more personalized, and the best outreach methods.
Engagement metrics, such as outreach performance and responses are often the best way to tell what resonates with adult learners. These numbers help institutions better understand motivations for returning, what communication channels they respond to, and what barriers stand in the way of returning to finish a credential.
Retention
Retention is a critical measure of success for re-enrolled adult learners at your institution. Adult learners often juggle multiple responsibilities, such as work, family, and education. Their ability to persist through challenges and stay committed to their educational goals greatly influences their likelihood of achieving academic success and earning a credential.
ReUp data shows that adult learners need to make many adjustments to their lives and schedules during their first term back. This highlights how important it is to provide a positive experience during this time. A recent ReUp survey of churned learners, defined as those who had re-enrolled but stopped out again, showed that the average number of credit hours these learners enrolled in was 14, which is more than a full course load. Encouraging returning students to play the long game, and to build on their first semester success, can lead to success in the long run. Based on data around retention at their school, several of our partners have initiated programs to track re-enrolled adult learners more closely and to offer additional support, like re-orientation programs, that smooth the transition.
The pathway to completion for adult learners is often non-linear. They may need to pause their education more than once for short breaks. ReUp helps our partners track term-to-term and non-continuous enrollment all the way to graduation to help institutions create more flexible entry and exit points.
Refine Your Adult Learner Strategy
Understanding these essential data points is key to developing effective strategies for re-engaging nontraditional adult learners. At ReUp, we provide our partners with detailed metrics and regular reviews to help identify trends and make informed decisions. Summaries provided three times per year cover everything from re-enrollment and retention to program popularity and the diversity of learners who are engaged and actively considering re-enrolling. Annual reviews with multiple stakeholders within a partner institution ensure broader awareness of data points, goals met, and current challenges.
For more insights and strategies on supporting nontraditional adult learners, check out our case studies and stay connected with us on LinkedIn.
Let’s start the conversation
Schedule a call with a ReUp team member to learn more about what a ReUp partnership could do for your institution.