How Can Schools Attract Non-Traditional Learners?
Higher ed leaders have increasingly understood that the ‘non-traditional’ student population is increasingly becoming the majority. According to a report by the Education Commission of the States, the percentage of adult learners is on the rise, and it is expected to grow at a faster rate than the traditional student population in the next seven years. An increasing number of students enrolled in two-or-four year institutions in the country fit at least one of the definitions of ‘non-traditional’ as offered by the National Center for Education Statistics, including attending college-part-time, works full-time, is financially independent, is a single parent or has dependents besides a spouse.
The ECS made clear that for higher ed institutions to continue to remain financially stable, schools must attract more of these groups of students, especially as the number of high school graduates is projected to drop in some regions of the country in the years to come. The challenge is particularly striking for smaller, liberal arts universities that typically rely on smaller numbers of students of a typically traditional age.
Some colleges and universities have been designed in order to attract adult and online learners, like the University of Maryland University College. The school enrolls more than 80,000 students throughout the world, with a variety of online and hybrid courses available for both degree and certification programs; it is the largest online public university in the country. Erika Orris, the school’s senior vice president of strategic enrollment management, said that the most vital aspect of an institution’s approach to attract non-traditional students was to have a strong marketing plan, especially with the level of increased competition.
“68% of our people come through digital marketing. The results we’ve seen over this past year has been phenomenal,” she said. “When advisors receive an inquiry, we want to make sure students have chosen to find a right program to see that it matches their career choice.”
Orris said many schools promoted the flexibility of their online programs in their advertising, but Orris found that to be ‘wasted seconds’ on marketing because the assumption among students was that online programs were flexible by definition. The market generally was moving in the direction of speed, with Orris saying programs needed to be eight weeks in order to properly competitive. She also noted schools needed to forego trying to directly translate an on-the-ground program into the online space, as well the need for flexibility in start times for enrolling students.
“You have to have frequent times of the year to start,” she said. “We find adults tend to make the decision to start, and choose a school and start to attend, it goes quickly.”
Allan Byrd, the director of enrollment at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, also found that quicker time-to-completion rates were attractive to non-traditional students, with the school finding that many students were willing to pay more in order to complete their studies quicker. The public university was formed in 1963, but has found increased success in attracting non-traditional learners. The school was named the fifth best college for adult learners by Great Value Colleges this past February. He acknowledged that the school was very good at recruiting traditional students.
“We know how to find them and market to them,” he said, but noted adult learners posed a unique challenge. “They almost shop in stealth. Some will request information, some won’t. You have to try a lot of different ways to reach them, whether it’s online, television or radio…by far, we know in terms of effectiveness, the best way is the face-to-face open houses.”
Byrd said he had found non-traditional students tended to be most interested in the strength and quality of the academic programs the school could offer, but time-to-degree completion was often a concern raised directly afterwards, as well as concerns regarding affordability and financial aid, and the likelihood of job placement after graduation.
Part of the issue is that too many higher ed institutions consider adult learners to be a “monolithic” group requiring the exact same needs, Margaret Dees, the senior vice president of enrollment management and communications for Jacksonville University, said. The school has had success with enticing adult learners, and Dees cautioned that if colleges and universities treat them in that way, they will not necessarily be on the radar of potential applicants.
“The best strategy is we don’t make assumptions about them. Don’t assume they want it all to be online; you see a lot of folks that push ‘you can do this from your own home.’ But what about the parent who needs the peace of a classroom and needs to concentrate?” she said. “If you’re not meeting the needs of those people, you’re going to miss them.”
Dees also said that some institutions mistakenly assume that all adult learners want to take classes that only consist of other adult students. While this may be true in some cases, it is by no means uniform, and Dees said faculty and students alike were positively served by a mix of traditional students and adult learners.
“I think what we do is we say we’re going to treat you like a student, and we’re going to look at your outcome, and learn the way that works best for you,” she said, noting that schools should be open to allowing non-traditional students into classes populated with “conventional” students if it is more conducive to their schedule (and, she noted, vice versa). “Don’t separate the train tracks so much that you lose the opportunities that are presented by those co-learning moments.”
Orris agreed that institutions needed to avoid making assumptions about adult learners, saying that schools that invested in research and focus groups to receive answers to these questions would benefit from informed decision making. But she said adult learners were always interested in understanding what their return on investment would be would help schools attract such applicants.
“Anything any institution can do to show outcomes of their graduates and programs is good, because adults don’t go to school just to go to school,” she said. “They’re going to advance their careers and switch careers. They need to make it worth their time and effort to achieve that degree.”
Smaller, renowned private liberal arts universities often have robust endowments to temporarily offset any drops in enrollment and tuition among younger learners, but those schools are also working to better attract non-traditional students. Some, like Smith College, have been working on the issue for decades in the form of the Ada Comstock Scholars Program offered to a number of adult learners seeking a liberal arts degree; the program began in 1975 and currently enrolls more than 100 students. Sidonia M. Dalby, an associate director of admissions and the advisor for the scholarship program, said the school offered family housing and residential halls where people can live nine to 12 months out of the year. Offering financial assistance can be a boon for schools like Smith, especially when adult learners may dismiss those kinds of institutions out of hand immediately due to assumptions about the costs.
“There are 104 students and 104 different ways they do Smith,” Dalby sad, noting that the school maintains relationships with community colleges in order to find prospective students who can transfer into the scholarship program. “Almost half of the students in the US are going to community college, and many of them are working, and one of the nice things about Smith is we have the funding to help students not have to work two to three jobs.”
Like Dees, Dalby stressed the importance of ensuring that students’ individual needs were considered; the type of focused attention, she said, would make potential students who could be considered non-traditional all the more likely to consider enrolling. While many adult learners likely do prefer the flexibility allowed with online or hybrid learning programs, Dalby said she wanted to make sure Smith continued to expand the breadth of its reach in offering its own experience to adult learners.
“When you have non-traditional students, they need to think about different things. If they start having discussion groups at 7pm at night, parents may not be able to do that,” she said. “You need to be sensitive to those differences so they’ll have a strong education.”
Author: Pat Donachie