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The Magnitude of ‘Some College, No Credential’ Adults in America

ByBlake Decker

With colleges and universities a month into the new academic year, much of the talk around higher education this time of year centers on enrollment, and rightfully so, given the historical nature of formula funding by state governments. We covered a number of challenges facing higher education in terms of enrollment in our blog post series from this past spring. However, one of the student populations often overlooked includes those individuals who started their career in higher education, but stopped-out before completing a certificate or degree. A new report by the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) Research Center captures data on these “Some College, No Credential” (SCNC) students and will serve as the basis for our fall blog series.

Exploring the SCNC population by state

The NSC Research Center defines SCNC students as “adults who left higher education without receiving a postsecondary credential” (NSC Report). According to the NSC, there were approximately 43.1-million “Some College, No Credential” students across the United States as of 2023. Nationally, the SCNC population increased by 7.15 million adults (ages 18 and up) from 35.95 million in 2018 to 43.1 million in 2023 (most recent year of data in the NSC report), which represents a 19.9% increase in five years. A subset of the overall SCNC population are those considered to be “working age” adults between 18 and 64 years old. In 2023, the NSC data showed there were 37.6 million SCNC students in this “working age” adult category. If we consider there were almost 203-million adults who were 18-64 years old in 2023, almost 1-in-5 “working age” adults in the United States are part of this “Some College, No Credential” group.

SCNC by State

In looking at state-level data, the visualizations below tell two parts to the SCNC story: how many SCNC students (18-64 years old) lived in each state in 2023-2024 (SCNC by State), and the proportion of the overall working-age population in the state were SCNC students (SCNC as % of Adults (18-64)).

  • The number of SCNC students on the map ranges from 37,000 in Washington, D.C. to almost 6 million in California. Texas had the second-highest number of SCNC students (18-64 year olds) at 2.64 million in 2023, followed by New York (1.94 million), Illinois (1.65 million), and Florida (1.61 million).
  • We can contextualize these counts in terms of what might be an “expected value” based on a known quantity by looking at a state’s proportion of the overall 18-64 year old population in the United States. This percentage provides a “baseline” representation that serves as an expected percentage of SCNC adults in the state.
    • While more populous states certainly had higher SCNC counts, a number of states had higher-than-expected proportions of their adults who were classified as SCNC students when compared to their baseline values. For example, California had 24.5 million adults (ages 18-64), which was 12.1% of the nationwide total of 203 million “working age” adults in the United States in 2023. However, California’s 5.94 million SCNC students accounted for 15.8% of the nation-wide number of 37.6 million SCNC students (ages 18-64). This means that California’s “observed” SCNC population was 31% higher (15.8%) than the “expected” proportion (12.1%) in relation to the United States as a whole.
    • By contrast, Texas’s 18.3 million “working age” adults comprised 9% of the total US population of adults (18-64 years old) in 2023, while the state’s 2.64 million SCNC students (18-64 years old) was only 7% of the overall SCNC count nationally, 22% below the expected value.

SCNC as % of Adults (18-64)

  • In addition to contextualizing SCNC counts as a portion of the national population, we can also use state-level data to understand the magnitude of the numbers of SCNC adults in the NSC data.
    • The second visualization above shows the percentage of adults (18-64) in each state who were considered SCNC in 2023. Eleven (11) states had at least 20% of their working-age adults who were “Some College, No Credential”, led by Oregon (26.1%), California (24.2%), and Wyoming (23.6%). No state had less than 10% of its working-age population that was identified as being SCNC in the NSC data.
    • In Texas, the NSC data showed that 14.5% (2.64M out of 18.25M) of adults (ages 18-64) were SCNC in 2023, a figure that places Texas 41st in comparison to the other states in America.
    • Texas was 4.1 percentage points lower than the national average of 18.6%, almost 10 percentage points lower than California (24.2%), and slightly below North Carolina (15.4%). By comparison, Texas was higher than both Florida (12.4%) and Georgia (11.7%) in terms of the percentage of adults (age 18-64) who were identified as SCNC in the NSC data.

So What?

As stated in the opening paragraph, the “Some College, No Credential” adult population is an often forgotten group of college and university students in America. The reasons for students stopping out of higher education institutions are plentiful, as finances, motivation or life changes, mental health, and academic challenges are often cited as primary reasons for students leaving school (How America Completes College). While the data above show that the stopped-out student population is growing, it is important to remember that not all SCNC students are equally likely to return to college. Many colleges, universities, and higher education systems have implemented processes that work to recruit and re-enroll these students. However, given finite resources, institutions need to be targeted in their efforts toward stopped-out student recruitment. In our next blog post, we will look at two groups of students in the NSC data that typically exhibit a higher likelihood to return to higher education, identified by the NSC as “Potential Completers” and “Recent Stopouts.”