Fewer Students Stopped Out Of College Last Year, And More Returned

Forbes

04-06-2025

More than one million Americans who had previously dropped out of college returned to school in ... More academic year 2023-2024. Nonetheless, the number of adults who have left college without earning any credential increased nationally.
For the second year in a row, the number of students leaving college without
earning a credential has declined, according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Released today, the Some College, No Credential (SCNC) report also found that more
students who had previously left college without earning a degree were re-enrolling.
More than 1 million SCNC students re-enrolled in the 2023-24 academic year, an increase of 66,000 (+7.0%) over the previous year. The number of students who 'stopped out' of college without a credential also declined from the previous year by about 156,000.
The progress was widespread, with 42 states and the District of Columbia realizing increases in the number of students re-enrolling in college compared to the previous year. The gains ranged from a .7% increase in Washington, DC, to a 35.2% surge in Massachusetts. Among states showing a decrease in re-enrollments, Oklahoma experienced the largest decline year-over-year, at 13.8%.
'It is inspiring to see that over one million adults returned to campuses last year—the
most we've ever recorded,' said Doug Shapiro, Executive Director of the National
Student Clearinghouse Research Center, in a news release. 'They're reviving college aspirations that had been put on hold years before. And states and institutions are working to make it even easier for more students to do so in the future.'
The report defines SCNC individuals as people between the ages of 18 and 64 years of age who stopped out of college for at least three terms prior to the start of the academic year and had not earned any credential. At the start of the 2023-2024 academic year, there were nearly 43.1 million SCNC students; of those, 37.6 million were working-age adults.
Even with the recent increases in re-enrollment, the report cautions that the improvement represents less than 3% of working-age SCNC adults. So while it's true that fewer students stopped out of college year over year, that has not been enough to stem the overall growth of the SCNC population, which has risen in all 50 states and the District of Columbia over the last three years.
Among those SCNC students returning to school in 2023-2024, 4.7% earned a credential — including certificates, associate's and bachelor's degrees — within their first year of re-enrollment, a slight improvement over the prior year; 14.1% did so within two years of their return.
More women than men re-enroll in college after stopping out, but men have a slight advantage in the two-year rate of earning their first credential (14.2%) vs. 13.9% among women.
Black and Hispanic students return to college after stopping out at equal or greater rates than their Asian and white peers. However, white and Asian returnees earn a credential after returning at higher rates than other racial/ethnic groups.
The report recommends that states seeking to increase the percentage of adults with a post-secondary credential focus on two subgroups of students who've demonstrated better re-enrollment and completion outcomes than the SCNC group overall. Those are potential completers and recent stop-outs.
Potential completers have already completed at least two years' worth of academic credits in the past decade; they constitute about 2.7 million (or 7.2%) of the SCNC population.
Recent stop-outs are newly identified SCNC individuals — those students who have stopped out between January, 2022 and July, 2023; roughly 2.1 million students (about 5.6% of SCNC individuals) are in this group.
Across the past three years, potential completers demonstrate a number of advantages in their college outcomes compared to the rest of the SCNC population. For example they are about three times more likely to re-enroll in college than other SCNC students. They are also more likely to earn a credential in their first year of return (8.4%) than the rest of the SCNC group (3.8%), an edge that grows when considering second-year credential rates (22% versus 12.2%).
Recent stop-outs are much more likely to re-enroll than students who have been stopped out for a longer period, and they are also more likely to enroll at the same institution they previously attended rather than transfer to another school. This pattern suggests that outreach strategies might be targeted at these relatively recent students, particularly by community colleges, which is the sector to which SCNC students most often return.
According to the report, about one out of four SCNC students earned a credential without ever re-enrolling in college. Although it does not quantify the reasons for this outcome, it's likely due primarily to the reverse transfer policies adopted by several states allowing students who've dropped out of two-year colleges to add the credits they later earn at a four-year school and then be retroactively awarded an associate's degree.
A similar program is the Colorado Re-Engaged (CORE) initiative, where former students who've completed at least 70 credits towards their bachelor's degree but then dropped out of college are awarded an associate's degree. The report found
that, despite having the twentieth-largest SCNC population, Colorado had the seventh-highest number of first credential earners, aided by the large number of associate degrees earned by SCNC individuals who had not re-enrolled.
In other cases, colleges have removed barriers that may have prevented awarding degrees to students who've already earned the required credits. For example. some schools have ended their policy of withholding degrees from students who have unpaid fines or tuition bills.
The report's bottom line is a mixture of good and bad news. It's encouraging to see an increase in students' re-engagement with college, but in the big scheme of things, that improvement represents only a relatively tiny share of the SCNC working adult population. Fewer students might be stopping out year over year, but their retention and the return of former drop-outs has not been enough to stop the growth of the SCNC population, which continues to rise nationwide.
The NSCRC is the research arm of the National Student Clearinghouse. It collaborates with higher education institutions, states, school districts, high schools, and educational organizations to gather accurate longitudinal data that can be used to guide educational policy decisions. NSCRC analyzes data from 3,600 postsecondary institutions, which represented 97% of the nation's postsecondary enrollment in Title IV degree-granting institutions in the U.S., as of 2020.
The 2025 Some College, No Credential report, the sixth in a series, was created with the support of Lumina Foundation.