Understanding and Recruiting Adult Degree Completers

Key Insights

This report explores three key findings from a survey of 1,000+ prospective adult students and offers specific marketing, recruitment, and program design strategies to enroll and serve adult degree completers.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to destabilize the U.S. economy and reinvigorate concerns about meeting enrollment and revenue goals, enrollment leaders are facing renewed pressure to recruit adult learners. One specific population of interest is adult degree completers, or students 25 and older who have some college credit but do not yet have a bachelor’s degree.

Today, there are 3.5 million “potential degree completers” in the United States, or adults who have completed at least two years’ worth of academic credit but do not have a bachelor’s degree or certificate. But recruiting this audience comes with a host of challenges. From identifying prospective degree completers despite the lack of test-taker lists to implementing best-fit marketing strategies during students’ long, meandering journey to reenrollment, recruiting degree completers requires thoughtful marketing across the enrollment funnel.

Read the full report or explore our major findings below to learn about adult degree completers’ mindset, motivations, and concerns, their program and institutional preferences, and their research behavior and catalysts to enrollment.