Jevona Anderson was 59 years old and nearly finished with her bachelor’s degree when life made the decision for her. After a series of family deaths, an eviction, and eventual homelessness, she found herself failing classes, falling behind on bills, and eventually dropping out.[i] She didn’t leave because she stopped caring. She left because the weight of everything else became too heavy to carry alongside the demands of a system not designed for people in her situation.
Her story isn’t an outlier. It’s the defining experience of roughly 40 million Americans who have attended college, accumulated credits, and sometimes debt, and left without a credential to show for it. These are not people who never tried. They are people whose lives outpaced a higher education system built around a student profile that no longer reflects the majority of learners.
That distinction matters enormously. Because the institutions and marketing teams that understand it, that approach this population as interrupted learners, are the ones positioned to solve one of the most consequential enrollment challenges of the next decade.
The Opportunity, in Brief
The numbers are significant: more than 40 million Americans fall into what researchers call the “some college, no credential” (SCNC) category. About 38 million of them are working-age adults. They represent more than 18% of the adult workforce, a workforce increasingly defined by credential requirements. Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce projects that by 2031, 66% of all good jobs will require at least a bachelor’s degree. Most SCNC adults don’t have one, yet many carry student loan debt as a daily reminder of what they started but couldn’t finish.
Momentum is building. Reenrollments among stopouts crossed 1 million in the 2023–2024 academic year, a 7% increase from the year before. That’s meaningful progress. But the overall SCNC population is still growing, because new stopouts continue to outnumber those returning. The gap between the opportunity and the response remains enormous.
This is a strategic imperative for institutions facing the well-documented demographic cliff, declining numbers of traditional 18-year-old enrollees. In other words, the 40 million adults in the SCNC category aren’t a backup plan. They ARE the plan.
Why They Left. And Why It Has to Shape Everything That Comes Next.
The word “dropout” has always carried more judgment than it deserves. It implies a choice made freely, a failure of will or commitment. The reality is far more structural.
SCNC adults leave college because of financial strain, caregiving demands, the impossible math of working full-time while attending classes designed for people who don’t. Three out of five have experienced housing or food insecurity. Nearly a quarter are parents. Almost half are fully financially independent. For many, college wasn’t abandoned, it was deferred, indefinitely, when something more urgent demanded their attention.
They leave, often, intending to return. And when they’re ready, they frequently encounter processes designed for first-time freshmen, advising models built for traditional schedules, and financial aid offices that weren’t set up with returning adults in mind.
The result is predictable. Bringing stopouts back takes an average of 24 intentional touchpoints — texts, emails, one-on-one conversations — before a single reenrollment happens. That’s what it takes to rebuild trust with someone who already gave higher ed a chance and found that it couldn’t accommodate their life.
Reaching this audience with a generic “Come Back” email campaign won’t cut it.
What Has to Be True Before the Marketing Can Work
Here is the reality that can be hard to hear for enrollment marketers: no amount of compelling messaging will sustainably move this audience if the experience they return to looks the same as the one they left.
Before institutions invest in outreach, they need to invest in design. Real, structural, learner-centered design. Drawing on CHEPP’s Learner-Centered Design Framework[ii] as a foundation, here are the four areas where institutions must do that foundational work, and where marketing leaders should be asking hard questions of their partners:
Structural flexibility built in, not bolted on. Online, hybrid, asynchronous, and competency-based options aren’t modern amenities. For adults managing jobs, children, aging parents, and unpredictable lives, they are the price of entry. The important caveat: flexibility of access without quality of design still fails learners. Graduation rates at primarily online institutions sit at just 20.9%, compared to 64.6% across all institutions. Online done poorly is just a different kind of barrier. Flexibility should be paired with intentional program design, not substituted for it.
Clear, frictionless re-entry. SCNC adults often have substantial credits already. They need to be able to see immediately, specifically, without jumping through bureaucratic hoops, exactly where those credits land, what still lies ahead, and what a realistic path to completion looks like. Credit for prior learning, transparent degree maps, and streamlined transfer processes are the difference between a returning learner who enrolls and one who logs off the website after 10 minutes of frustration.
Wraparound support that travels with the learner. Academic advising, financial aid coaching, mental health resources, career counseling — these cannot be campus-only, 9-to-5 services. Adult learners who stop out often do so because the non-academic parts of their lives overwhelm the academic ones. Institutions serious about serving this population build support structures that meet learners in their modality, on their schedule, at the moment of need. Support that isn’t accessible isn’t really support at all.
Institutional commitment, not a pilot program. Serving adult learners requires genuine organizational alignment: budget decisions, leadership buy-in, and cultural change. When re-engagement initiatives are underfunded side projects managed by a single enrollment coordinator, returning learners feel it. It shows in the responsiveness of staff, the relevance of messaging, the coherence of the experience. Half-measures produce half-results.
The marketing cannot outrun the institution. But when the institution has done this foundational work, the marketing has something real to say.
The Marketing Imperative: Earning Back Trust at Every Touchpoint
Assuming the institution has done the design work — or is doing it in earnest — what does effective re-engagement marketing look like? Not in the abstract, but in practice?
It starts with a reframe from acquisition marketing to relationship marketing, and it requires a fundamentally different orientation at every stage. Here’s what that means in practice:
Lead with empathy, not urgency. SCNC adults carry complicated feelings about their unfinished degrees: guilt, regret, and a protective skepticism toward institutions that couldn’t accommodate their lives the first time around. Marketing that leads with credential-completion pressure, or that implies they’ve been falling behind, is almost guaranteed to backfire. The most effective re-engagement campaigns lead instead with acknowledgment of life’s complexity, of the courage it takes to return, and with concrete, credible evidence that something is genuinely different now. Not a promise. Proof.
Treat personalization as the baseline, not a bonus. Institutions already have data on these adults: enrollment history, credits earned, program areas, time since stopout. A 29-year-old with 90 credits in nursing and a 52-year-old with 45 credits in business administration have almost nothing in common in terms of what they need to hear or what a return to school looks like in their lives. Segmenting by life stage, credit proximity to completion, and program area is what makes outreach feel like it was written for a real person rather than a category.
Design for persistence, not volume. The 24-touchpoint average isn’t a license to flood inboxes. It’s a mandate for sequenced, strategic communication, where each touchpoint feels like a natural next step in a conversation:
- An email that acknowledges a previous interaction
- A text that follows up on a specific question
- A retargeted ad that reflects where someone is in their decision-making process, not just what they clicked on once
- A personal outreach from an advisor at the moment a prospect goes quiet
The goal is continuity, not frequency. Persistence that feels like caring is re-engagement marketing. Persistence that feels like a drip sequence is noise.
Integrate marketing with the re-entry experience. This may be the most critical and most commonly neglected strategic principle. The promise made in a re-engagement ad has to be kept on day one of re-enrollment. That means marketing teams need to be in active conversation with admissions, financial aid, advising, and student services. When a returning adult responds to a campaign built around “a clear path back” and then encounters confusing credit evaluation processes, holds on their account, or an advisor who doesn’t know their program, not only will the marketing have failed, it will have also made things worse. A broken experience following a compelling message destroys more trust than silence ever would.
The Institutions That Get This Will Define the Decade
Let returning learners do the talking. Institutional voice has limited credibility with this audience. Peer voice from people who left under similar circumstances, who came back and found their way through carries disproportionate weight. Authentic, specific testimonials from returning adult learners communicate trust. The more specific the story (not “going back changed my life,” but “I had 78 credits and thought they’d all expired, here’s what actually happened”), the harder it works.
The demographic cliff is not a metaphor. It is a structural reality bearing down on enrollment offices across the country. The traditional pipeline of 18-year-old first-time freshmen is shrinking.
The institutions that navigate this moment successfully will be the ones that look at 40 million adults with partial college education and see not a remediation challenge, but a strategic opportunity, and then build, honestly and completely, for what that opportunity actually requires.
That means doing the hard design work: creating pathways that are structurally flexible, genuinely supportive, and frictionless to navigate. And it means backing that work with marketing that is empathetic, personalized, persistent, and integrated deeply enough with the student experience that the message and the reality are the same thing.
The 40 million are not waiting for a better brochure. They’re waiting for a reason to believe that this time will be different.
[i] Anderson, J. as reported in: “Millions in the U.S. Never Finished College. With Targeted Help, Reenrollments Are Ticking Up.” Associated Press, April 2026.
[ii] O’Sullivan, R. “Unpacking the 40 Million: Meeting the Needs of Learners with Some College and No Credential.” The Center for Higher Education Policy and Practice (CHEPP) and Today’s Students Coalition, February 2025. https://www.chepp.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/CHEPP_40-MILLION_FACT-SHEET.pdf
