Which Factors Motivate Some College, No Degree Students?

A new survey of some college, no degree (SCND) potential admits has just been released, but this poll is very different from other studies of stopouts we’ve covered here at OnlineEducation.com. Conducted by UPCEA and the online education provider StraighterLine, this appears to be the first study that attempts to analyze the specific factors that encourage such potential applicants to re-enroll—and to estimate the probability they will return to college and complete their degrees.

A related study released in June 2024 by NSCRC, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found that this group of potential SCND applicants continues to grow. Almost 37 million Americans aged 65 and below didn’t earn a credential despite earning college credits, and this is viewed as a critical group of potential students by many institutions. Colleges facing enrollment declines and even possible closures because of the upcoming “enrollment cliff” among traditional-age students have increasingly targeted these potential returning admits for outreach efforts to help them re-enroll and graduate.

UPCEA and StraigherLine’s new poll of about 1,000 SCND learners across the nation revealed “a serious relational disconnect between the SCND population and higher education institutions,” said statistician Jim Fong, UPCEA’s chief research officer and an expert in higher education marketing and outreach. In a prepared statement, Fong also said that’s because many in this group appear to question the value of a bachelor’s degree—and even appear to distrust higher education.

The survey reveals that after people leave college without a degree, their impressions of a college degree’s value change. Before enrolling in college, 84 percent had believed that they required a degree to satisfy their career objectives. But after stopping out, only 34 percent still hold that belief.

That change poses a substantial challenge for re-enrollment outreach efforts. As we’ll see in the next section, the reason why is that the study identified the perceived current value of a degree to be the third most predictive factor when determining readiness for a return to higher education.

Moreover, only 42 percent believe that postsecondary institutions are trustworthy, “underscoring a trust deficit that institutions must address,” say the authors. Why these students stopped trusting their colleges isn’t clear from the data because the pollsters didn’t appear to ask about those experiences. However, what is abundantly clear is that this lack of trust also poses a formidable outreach challenge since the second most predictive factor for returning to college involves the respondents’ opinions about trust and communications from schools.

Commenting further about this “relational disconnect,” Fong continued:

We really need to do a reset here regarding how we interface with this learner. They are not the same learners from a decade ago, yet the programs, marketing and enrollment management processes are largely the same. There’s a lot that colleges and universities can do to better engage [this] learner, as well as create meaningful milestones on their journey toward a degree.

That so many respondents said they didn’t believe in the value of a college degree seems especially disconcerting. That’s because their opinion fails to align with the latest research released by Georgetown University, showing that a bachelor’s degree is far and away the single most crucial factor in securing a good job, paying $60,000 or more by age 30. Moreover, bachelor’s degree holders earn a lifetime median of $2.8 million, 75 percent more than those who only earned high school diplomas.

What factors did the UPCEA/StraighterLine study identify that best predicted learners’ re-enrollments? Based on a multiple regression factor analysis—a statistical method that simplifies complex data—the researchers developed a 100-point “Student Readiness Index” as a metric that quantifies the probability a stopped-out student might re-enroll.

Interestingly enough, the top factors had nothing to do with academic results typically reviewed by college committees making admission decisions, like past grades or scores on college entrance exams.

Instead, the top factor was a novel quality the pollsters describe as a blend of psychological resilience combined with the ability to thrive within new daily routines. Yet at the same time, the previously cited factors related to institutional trustworthiness and belief in a college degree’s value ranked not far behind.

Ranked in order of importance, here are the seven main factors identified by the report as crucial in going back to college:

• Mental resilience and routine readiness
• Positive opinions on institutional trustworthiness and communication
• Belief in the value of a degree
• Financial readiness
• Time management skills
• Personal support systems
• Career and personal motivations

Those who had previously enrolled in degree programs averaged a readiness index score of 50.1, slightly less than those enrolled in certificate programs who averaged 50.7.

UPCEA also asked about incentives, and those results mirror the readmission inducements found to be most effective by other studies. One example involves the study of stopped-out students in the Golden State by the advocacy group California Competes which we had reviewed in our 2024 article “Comebackers: How Colleges Can Help Returning Students Re-Enroll and Graduate.”

More than half of UPCEA’s respondents said that a contingent salary raise would drive them to re-enroll, and 38 percent said a switch to a new career would also encourage them. About four-fifths also claimed that they were motivated by personal or family goals.

Consistent with almost every other study of the SCND population, UPCEA and StraighterLine also identified financial obstacles as re-enrollment barriers. Almost three-quarters of respondents reported their re-enrollment depended on affordability as a key factor, and almost six in ten said that college costs weren’t affordable for them at present. The paradox here is that most potential readmits want to go back to college so they can earn larger salaries and win better jobs, yet most lack the financial resources that will make their readmission possible.

“Evidently, institutions must prioritize financial incentives to drive re-enrollment and re-engage individuals who have previously left higher education programs,” write the authors. Examples of such incentives they cite include affordable tuition, expanded financial aid, grants and scholarships, and discounted or free resources like textbooks and courseware. Because only about half of Americans polled by a 2023 New America survey believe that high-quality education is financially accessible, the authors argue that incentives like these are vital to encourage SCND stopouts to engage with admissions staff.

Nonfinancial support from the schools can also help encourage readmissions. Of the small proportion of four percent (42 applicants) who said that they had already applied for readmission, 84 percent of this group said they had received ample support from colleges, and 88 percent thought their enrollment process seemed efficient. But about a third of that group also reported issues that concerned them, like a lack of communication from colleges, questions not timely answered, or insufficient support with financial aid.

In sum, the survey’s results indicate that colleges need to rapidly and drastically change their outreach strategies if they really want large numbers of stopouts to come back to school.

Dr. Amy Smith, StraighterLine’s chief learning officer, said in the statement that “We wanted to know which factors matter most, and what could be the leading predictor of a student’s success when returning to college. As traditional student enrollment declines and institutions close their doors, more than 40 million adult learners are waiting to be re-engaged.

“The time has come for higher education to rethink its strategy.”

The “enrollment cliff” refers to a sharp projected decline in traditional-age college students beginning in 2025. As this interactive data visualization (IDV) shows, the steep decrease in birth rates produced by the 2008 Great Recession—a time when millions of jobless American couples couldn’t afford to have children—caused this demographic shift.

The consensus among forecasters predicts that this shift will result in a decline in the number of college students of roughly 15 percent across the nation, amounting to about 576,000 fewer students between 2025 and 2029. And it seems like this trend may already be causing problems, given that the number of recent college closures and mergers appears to have suddenly spiked when compared with the very few such events during the recent pandemic era starting in 2020.

But does that estimate mean we’ll witness widespread college closures all over the country? Probably not. Despite a flood of panicked coverage in the education press early in 2025 heralding the enrollment cliff’s arrival, it’s important to recognize that there will be vast differences in this trend’s effects, both on regions of the country and on individual colleges and universities.

For example, here’s another data visualization provided by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. This IDV displays the enrollment cliff’s dramatically different effects on various regions, with some areas much more severely affected than others.

WICHE’s map depicts each state’s projected percent change in the number of high school graduates between 2023 and 2041. These graduates tend to be a leading indicator of college enrollment trends—and the variation among the states on this map is enormous.

By dragging the cursor around the map, one might reasonably expect that some colleges could be at risk in several of the largest industrial states with drastic predicted declines in high school graduates. For example, Illinois is projected to lose a whopping 31 percent of its high school graduates, California will lose 30 percent, and New York will lose 25.

However, note that there’s also a cluster of states, mostly within the Deep South, that are likely to witness gains in the numbers of their high school graduates—likely providing “safe harbors” for these states’ colleges. They include Tennessee, which will gain 12 percent, Florida and South Carolina, which will both gain 10 percent, and Texas, which will gain 6 percent.

The enrollment cliff’s impact is also likely to vary wildly depending on the type of college or university. In an October 2024 report prepared for the Brookings Institution, Dr. Dick Startz, an economics professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, argues that the overall proportion of institutions closing will be small, with the proportion of affected students even smaller. For example, during 2024 only 17 colleges closed, and those schools had an average enrollment of only 120 students; that’s a very small number compared to America’s 11 million students at colleges and universities.

Moreover, he suggests that large four-year R1 research institutions face virtually no closure risk. These include flagship state systems backed by tax revenues like the University of California, which last year received 110,000 applications. They also include private universities backed by substantial endowments like this one, which alone controls 6 percent of the nation’s endowment funding.

Nevertheless, Dr. Startz also points out that America has many small colleges with few students and few or no endowments to fall back on if their enrollments decline further. In fact, half of America’s colleges enroll fewer than 2,200 students, a third enroll less than 1,000—and most of these very small colleges have no endowments. These schools, he says, will be the institutions most at risk now and in the coming years because they’re vulnerable to even small swings in enrollments. Moreover, such campuses in states like Illinois and California with severe declines in high school graduates will face compounded threats.

Irrespective of institution size, Dr. Startz argues that the most widespread risk from the enrollment cliff involves degree program downsizings and shutdowns, many of which occurred during 2024 within regional universities in West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Inside Higher Ed covered 19 of these program cuts during August and September.

By contrast, the programs least vulnerable to such budget cuts are the online degree programs. In our January 2025 article “Demand for Online Courses Surges Again: New Study,” 65 percent of the chief online learning officers from 300 U.S. colleges reported that converting degree programs on campus to digital versions was their top priority.

A key driver of those conversions is that the strategically important market of SCND stopouts strongly prefers online degree programs. As we point out in our August 2024 article “Huge Surprises From the 2024 Online College Students Report,” an Education Dynamics survey found that 70 percent of students who enrolled in an online program had earned at least 15 credits from a previous attempt at a college degree.