Colleges look for returns

Ex-students get nudge to finish

The University of Arkansas System has started the state’s first large-scale effort in several years to re-enroll adult learners who have earned some college credits but no degree.

The system is targeting more than 100,000 former students who attended one of its five public universities and seven community colleges over the past seven years but never finished a degree program. The goal is to get those students enrolled in either the school from which they dropped out or in the system’s standalone online-only university, eVersity.

The effort is in line with the state’s push to have more college graduates to build a better educated workforce, which will attract more companies and offer Arkansans jobs with higher pay, officials have said. Arkansas has ranked historically at or near the bottom in degree attainment, and, according to the Lumina Foundation — a private group working to increase the number of Americans who hold highskilled job training certificates or degrees — the state has 355,280 adults who have completed some college coursework but did not

earn a degree.

UA System President Donald Bobbitt said campuses across the state do a “fantastic job” with students between the ages of 18 to 22. But campuses don’t serve adults as well, he said. Referring to the Lumina Foundation study, Bobbitt said those adults have gone to college, paid money, acquired debt and have no degree that could advance them economically.

Former Gov. Mike Beebe and Gov. Asa Hutchinson “understand that in order for us to continue to attract the types of corporate enterprises we want, to provide the jobs, the quality of life, the cultural amenities it takes to keep Arkansas as a very desirable place to live, we have got to have an educated workforce. It’s one of the first boxes that gets checked when a company is looking,” Bobbitt said.

“And if you look at the goals that they have set … and you look at the completion rates that we’ve had, we are never going to hit those goals if those are the only students [18- to 22-year-olds] we’re concentrating on.”

A handful of states are carrying out similar efforts.

In Indiana, the “You Can. Go Back.” initiative began last year and has brought back more than 9,000 adults, only a fraction of the 750,000 adults with some college but no degree. It has received about $7.5 million in state grants for financial support for the adult learners.

Legislators in North Carolina handed the University of North Carolina General Administration one-time funds of $2.3 million last year for its attempt to re-enroll adult learners. The administration has 10 projects which include degree audits of students who have dropped out and further analyses of that group of students. The system offers accelerated online courses and pooling courses among different institutions, said Junius Gonzales, senior vice president for academic affairs for the UNC System.

Tennessee started Reconnect, which has provided nearly $750,000 to back initiatives including a pilot program for deferred payment plans and adult-specific orientation programs. Through Reconnect, Tennessee has sent 50,000 push cards to students with half of the credits required for a degree and taken out advertisements on television, radio and billboards, according to its website. The state also provides “last dollar” grants, or money to top off federal aid for a complete tuition scholarship through endowments from its lottery proceeds, according to Emily House, assistant executive director of policy, planning and research with the state’s Higher Education Commission.

In Arkansas, the state Department of Higher Education partnered with Arkansas Community Colleges and the Arkansas Research Center beginning in 2013. With a $500,000 grant over two years from the Kresge Foundation, the group carried out Credit When It’s Due, which aimed to give students who had enough credits but no associate degree that credential.

That program was moderately successful but ran out of funds, said Michael Moore, the system’s vice president of academic affairs.

Many public universities in the state have recently started reaching out to students who have stopped attending, called stop-outs.

Arkansas Tech University in Russellville has the Bachelor of Professional Studies track for students looking to finish and earn a degree, said Sam Strasner, director of university relations, but communication efforts in that area are more about career advancement. In May, the university reached out to more than 1,000 stopped-out students via e-mail, in which Tech shared a YouTube video of student T.J. May who, after his third year at the university, stopped and joined the military. He has since re-enrolled.

“It is our hope that T.J.’s inspiring story will help others in a similar position understand that higher education has multiple access points, and student success isn’t solely defined by the model of completing a bachelor’s degree in four years,” Strasner said.

Henderson State University in Arkadelphia also started an initiative this summer, calling up about 60 students who have incomplete graduation applications and 20 or fewer hours to complete a degree, said Tonya Smith, executive director of marketing and communications. Advisers call a first time and follow-up with a text message platform.

At Arkansas State University, the current practice is to home in on students who were enrolled during the academic year but did not come back the next year, said Jill Simons, assistant vice chancellor of undergraduate studies.

“We largely focus on a oneyear stop out window,” Simons said. “However, some of our academic departments reach out to students beyond this period.”

The Jonesboro university reaches out using several methods, including social media and phone calls, she said, but personalized outreach has worked best. ASU does not track how many stop-out students return, but the university is seeing an increase in retention rates, meaning it has fewer students dropping out, she said.

Moore, who also has led eVersity, said in his experience colleges and universities reach out to students who may not have registered for the next semester, maybe even for the next year.

“Many times schools are so interested in what’s coming in the front door, trying to do the recruiting,” he said. Reaching out to students who have been gone longer “just takes willpower and sustained energy. And if somebody’s … been gone three years, four years, as an institution, you kind of start going, ‘How much time is it worth on our part and how much money is it worth on our part to try to convince somebody who has been gone three or four years to come back to school?’”

Chances are it’s going to be diminishing returns, he said.

“If I don’t get you back in three months, it’s going to be hard,” Moore said. “If I don’t get you back in six months, it’s even harder. If I don’t get you back in two years, it’s really, really hard. So at some point, a lot of places will just age-out somebody. They’ll just take them off a list, and we’re not going to bother them.”

Another difference between those efforts and the UA System’s is that students will have an opportunity to enroll in eVersity, which Moore said was designed for adult learners. The online-only university has seven semesters — six-week courses with built-in workplace competencies and no textbooks, he said.

Over the past two weeks, the UA System took a list of about 6,500 former University of Arkansas at Monticello students and began cleaning the student data in-house. It has sent out emails from Bobbitt and UAM Chancellor Karla Hughes, encouraging students to finish their degree at UAM. If students are unable to do so, the email also introduces eVersity as an alternative to earning their degree.

The emails have gotten higher-than-expected “open rates,” measuring times that the message was actually opened, but not so with “clickthrough rates,” or those measuring how many times the recipients clicked on the links to the school’s website and to eVersity’s webpage, said Dan Shisler, eVersity’s director of marketing. About 0.29 percent of recipients unsubscribed, he said, and about one-fifth of the email addresses bounced back.

The challenge with the lists is that student contact information may not be updated, Moore said. The even bigger challenge is “breaking through that fog” for the students, he said, adding that many stopped-out students are jaded about their experiences with higher education.

Moore said the key is persistence through repeated messaging because it’s not an easy decision to go back to college.

The system plans to further refine the Monticello list in hopes of reaching those students whose contact information was not up-to-date. Afterward, it will phase in other schools within the system, continuing its eVersity marketing and fine-tuning its messages to the students.

The UA System hopes to periodically update the lists and, in the future, help other nonsystem schools reach out to its stop-outs, Moore and Shisler said.

Bringing adult learners back to higher education to earn a degree is a statewide problem, and Arkansas needs solutions, Moore said.

The state needs more people with degrees, and the traditional high school-to-college student alone isn’t going to cut it, he and Bobbitt, the system president, said. While the college-going rate for that population remains high, the number of students coming through the kindergarten through 12th grade pipeline is either flat or diminishing, they said.

Many adults in Arkansas have jobs that do not support a livable wage for a family of four, Moore said.

High school graduates in Arkansas have a median annual salary of $24,987, while those with an associate degree have a median salary of $32,383, according to a 2009 study by the Education Commission of the States and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems. Those with bachelor’s degrees earn a median annual salary of $41,978, the study showed. Over a lifetime, the numbers add up.

“It’s an economic development issue,” Moore said. “People with college degrees attract better employers to the state because they want a more educated workforce. People with college degrees that have better jobs earn higher wages, which means they buy better homes and better cars and they spend more at the grocery store and they take more vacations and they buy the lakehouse.”

It’s not an accident that Arkansas is 48th in the nation in terms of the percent of people with a college education and 49th in the nation in terms of mean income, he said.

“This is an investment that makes sense for the state to be a part of,” he said. “And I don’t mean just the state government, I mean everybody in the state.”