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Re-Enrollment Trends of ‘Some College, No Credential’ Adults in America

ByBlake Decker

With this blog post, we return to our blog series where we explore data from an updated report by the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) Research Center related to the “Some College, No Credential” adult population in America. As we have seen in previous blog posts, the NSC data showed there were approximately 43.1-million “Some College, No Credential” (SCNC) adults across the United States in 2023. From this 43.1-million total, the NSC estimated there were almost 38 million “working age” adults (18-64 years old) classified as SCNC in 2023, with 2.6 million of those SCNC working adults living in Texas.

Beyond capturing the magnitude of the SCNC population, the NSC data also provided insights into several success metrics related to SCNC students who re-enrolled in higher education. The remainder of this blog post looks at re-enrollment trends nationally and at the state level in terms of total re-enrollment and re-enrollment rates of SCNC adults.

Overall Re-Enrollment of SCNC Adults

By way of reminder, the NSC defines an SCNC adult as someone who has been “stopped out for at least three terms prior to the start of an academic year” (NSC Definitions). In order to determine re-enrollment status, the NSC states that re-enrollment is “defined as enrolling (part-time or full-time) at least once during an academic year following a stopout of at least three consecutive terms” (NSC Definitions).

  • In the first visualization below, we can see that 2.7% (or just over 1 million) of the 37.6 million SCNC working adults (18-64 years old) re-enrolled during the 2023-2024 academic year in the United States. On the x-axis, the national average across all states for the number of re-enrolled SCNC working adults was 17,835.
  • In terms of re-enrollment rate, Utah held the top spot with 4% (14,987 out of 379,401) of their SCNC working adults re-enrolling in AY2023-2024, closely followed by Arizona (3.9%, 28,312 out of 726,294) and Maryland (3.9%, 23,296 out of 602,232).
  • Looking at total numbers of re-enrollment by state, California led all states with almost 170,000 SCNC adults who re-enrolled (169,952 out of 5.94 million, 2.9%). Texas was second with 81,468 re-enrollees out of 2.64 million SCNC working adults, placing Texas 7th in terms of re-enrollment rate at 3.1%. Florida (45,379 out of 1.6 million, 2.8%) and New York (43,126 out of 1.9 million, 2.2%) were the other states with re-enrollment totals for SCNC adults exceeding 40,000 in the NSC data.

Re-Enrollment by Group

In addition to the total number of re-enrolled SCNC adults, the NSC data also included re-enrollment data for “Recent Stopouts” and “Potential Completers.” In short, Recent Stopouts were those SCNC adults who were newly identified during the reporting year as having stopped out of higher education, while Potential Completers were SCNC adults with “at least two years of full-time equivalent enrollment in the decade prior to the start of the academic year” (NSC Definitions).

While certainly not earth-shattering information, the second visualization above (Re-Enrollment by Group) clearly shows that recently stopped-out SCNC working adults are more likely to re-enroll in higher education than those who left college in the more distant past. NOTE: The chart shows a selection of states as opposed to including the complete list of rank-ordered top states.

  • Recent Stopouts
    • At a national level, almost 240,000 (11.4%) of the 2.1 million SCNC working adults (18-64 years old) who were Recent Stopouts re-enrolled in the 2023-2024 academic year. There were a total of 18 states that exceeded the group-level national average re-enrollment rate in the NSC data.
    • Utah’s re-enrollment rate for Recent Stopouts of 22.8% (6,812 of 29,863) led all states by a significant margin, with Maryland second at 16% (6,472 of 40,653).
    • Texas tied for the 9th-best re-enrollment rate at 12% (20,953 of 175,109). California’s 11.7% re-enrollment rate (40,224 of 343,557) was tied for 14th, while Florida’s 10.9% (10,919 of 100,218) was below the national average.
  • Potential Completers
    • Across the United States, 194,420 (7.2%) of the 2.7 million SCNC working adults who were Potential Completers re-enrolled in the 2023-2024 academic year. There were 13 states that exceeded the national average for this group in the NSC data.
    • Maryland (9.8%, 4,187 of 42,595) and Rhode Island (9.4%, 691 of 7,338) were the only two states exceeding a 9-percent re-enrollment rate for Potential Completers.
    • California had the 3rd-highest re-enrollment rate for Potential Completers at 8.5% (35,057 of 413,293), with Texas ranking 8th with a 7.7% (15,814 of 206,320) re-enrollment rate for this group.

So What?

NSC’s re-enrollment data for the “Some College, No Credential” working adults strongly reinforces the notion of how important it is to re-engage stopped-out students as early as possible once they’ve left an institution of higher education. At a national level, when including all SCNC working adults in the data, only 1 out of every 32 SCNC adults re-enrolled in higher education in the AY2023-2024 data. By contrast, “Recent Stopouts” were over 4-times more likely to re-enroll when compared to the overall re-enrollment rate, and “Potential Completers” were almost 3-times more likely to re-enroll. Even in Utah, the top-performing state for overall re-enrollment rates, Recent Stopouts were almost 6-times more likely to re-enroll than SCNC working adults in the overall population.

Getting SCNC working adults back into school is just the first step towards success. Once re-enrolled, how effective are colleges and universities in terms of supporting re-enrolled students to promote persistence that leads to credential completion? The outcome-based metrics will serve as the topic of our next blog post in the series.