Getting Started: Determine Your College’s Priority Areas

Community college leaders need to align their efforts to increase adult enrollment with their students' most urgent needs and the priorities of the school. To determine which institutional policies and practices community colleges should change to increase adult enrollment, colleges should undertake the following three-step process:

Community colleges can learn valuable lessons about how to increase adult enrollment by talking to both currently enrolled and stopped-out adult students. Our field research suggests that community colleges miss critical opportunities to design effective, student-centric enrollment and reenrollment policies.

Community colleges should speak with at least five currently enrolled and five stopped-out adult students, either via focus groups or one-on-one interviews. Colleges should ask the following questions:

• How well aligned is/was your academic program with your career and educational goals?
• What is/was the enrollment process like for you?
• What are/were your biggest challenges as you pursued your course of study?
• How well do we communicate with you?
• What could we do to better help you meet your academic goals?
• For stopped-out students:
  • Why did you stop out?
  • Do you still see college completion as relevant to your career goals?
  • What would help you reenroll?
  • What barriers do you face as you consider reenrolling in college?

To supplement these conversations, community colleges should distribute a survey to all currently enrolled and stopped-out adult students to learn more about their experiences on campus. Colleges should design surveys to uncover the real reasons why students were initially motivated to attend college, why students stopped out, and what the college could change to better meet student needs. The combination of survey data and conversations with adult students will help college leaders gain a clearer understanding of the types of institutional changes they can make to increase adult enrollment.

To design interventions to increase adult enrollment that are most tailored to the needs of the community a college serves, community colleges need to analyze data to determine which types of students stop out and why. Colleges should analyze data on stopped-out students by race, age, socioeconomic status, and program of study to see if there are particular groups of students that are most at risk of stopping out. They should supplement this analysis by analyzing student survey data to understand the reasons why certain student groups do stop out of college. This work can inform preventative and reenrollment efforts.

After colleges speak to students and analyze enrollment and student survey data, they should determine a priority area to focus on in order to increase student enrollment. The rest of this playbook can help colleges reflect on potential priority areas and it will provide a list of recommendations within each priority area.