The Beginning and the End: Rethinking Newbies, "Dropouts," Returners, & Alumni in Modern Higher Education

The following article has been adapted from an excerpt from my new book, Commencement: The Beginning of a New Era in Higher Education, co-authored by Dr. Joe Sallustio and with contributions by Elvin Freytes.

The Beginning and the End

So much of what we do in colleges and universities around the world focuses on beginnings and ends — matriculating into a program, starting or finishing an academic term, surviving finals week, crossing finish lines (in terms of a service-learning project or a thesis or “comps” or a dissertation), transferring to the next program or step, and — of course, receiving a degree or certificate credential. There’s a reason Dr. Joe Sallustio and I titled our new book Commencement; starting and ending big initiatives, programs, and even personal relationships is what higher education does best. But even that — the way we “start and end” in higher education — deserves our scrutiny.

I recall a moment on The EdUp Experience Podcast when one of us called out an “old-school” mindset and practice that needs revision — industry-wide. We were reminded that, in the past (and, to a significant extent, still now), going to college was all about getting a degree, and if you left without a degree, you were a failure.

Think about the language we use for students who take a break or who decide to end their educational pursuits before their college or university considers them to be done: We call them “dropouts.”

We talk about graduation rates as “success” and people who are infinitely more well-educated after having taken some courses with us as “failures” if they don’t walk away in the end with the pretty piece of paper.

During the past few years, I’ve been arguing (politely but passionately!) with one of my higher-education clients over a practice that I found unconscionable (and strategically and financially short-sighted). This college admitted to me — quite casually — that a former vice president of advancement had purged former students from their alumni database if those former students didn’t leave with the fancy piece of paper in hand. In their mind, if you didn’t “graduate,” you’re not an alumnus. Mind you, some of these former students who were scrubbed from the mailing list and never again engaged by the institution were individuals who:

• Had spent $30,000 or more on tuition and room-and-board
• Had lived on campus and were involved socially and academically to a great degree
• Were now successful and even renowned experts
• Had grown up to have the luxuries of time and money to come back or otherwise support the school
• Absolutely love the school and regard all their memories fondly
• Miss the institution and don’t understand why they’re not being engaged, and
• Stopped out without petitioning for graduation, usually because of extenuating circumstances beyond their control (e.g., financial limitations, illness, family emergency, job relocation).

Treating people who need to or want to stop out (forever or for a while) like “dropouts” is a huge mistake. It’s human to need a break, and the pandemic has illustrated how acute our mental health is to our overall well-being and ability to stay focused. Things happen, particularly for adult learners with responsibilities far beyond rolling out of bed and dragging themselves to class. Life happens. It’s key for all of us to remember what a privilege it is for a student who has the support and resources to complete a degree without obstacles. The student is, more than ever, forcing the redesign of what institutions expect.

This idea of learners being able to “stop in and stop out” is a huge piece of higher education’s future. A decade ago, Coursera arrived on the scene and promised its students that they could “Learn Without Limits.” Udemy promised learners around the world that they would “be able.” And the rest is history.

Don Kilburn of UMass Online talked to us candidly about the growing demand from the marketplace for higher education to let learners set the pace for how they stop in and stop out, and whether there should be embedded credentials or certificates inside degree programs. He told us:

“We have this notion in higher education that there’s a four-year degree or a two-year degree. And for many students who are what we consider ‘degree completers,’ they have spent maybe three months, four months working in a degree program, then life got in the way, and they didn’t get through. So how do we begin to create competencies and shorter things within that educational degree that will allow somebody, if they have to drop, to still get a better job? I sometimes have been accused of making things too simplistic, but I frequently think that, for certain populations, if we got a person an interview, a job, or a promotion that they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten, that’s a pretty good measure of success for many. Because education does change a trajectory — for not just individuals, but families. So, I have also been thinking a lot about: ‘How do we get milestones or gates along the path that actually allow somebody to achieve something that would be recognized as important going forward?’”

Kilburn reminds us that the degree is not everything — that what matters is social and economic mobility ... and that doesn’t always require a degree.

So today, we are contemplating the many ways in which higher education can (and does) demonstrate its value and meet its mission — in new ways for new learners in a new era. The moment we step back to consider post-secondary education as more than a path to a pretty piece of paper, we can clearly see where we have been and where we are headed. Alas, higher education — for hundreds of years — has been a one-trick pony.

“We offer associate’s degrees” or “We offer bachelor’s degrees” (in different majors and flavors and formats) or “Come here for your juris doctor” or “We can give you a medical degree.” The marketing has all sounded alike because the products were all alike. We have peddled degrees — typically in rigid two-year and four-year formats and delivered on-campus for big sums of money and only to young people who don’t have partners, children, jobs, or mortgages — for centuries. Conferring degrees was our only business. Higher education is a time-honored tradition; but traditions change.

So, here we are, in the 2020s, and the world (and the prospective learner) has changed. We can no longer sell them the same experience or product that we sold to their grandparents. And the good news is that many institutions don’t want to; they have fully embraced the many evolutions and revolutions taking place in higher education and, already, what they’re offering looks nothing like your mama’s college story. Higher education is more adaptable than ever. As we all continue to expand our offerings — our menu of options for a broad range of stakeholders — we begin to “meet students where they are”[1] by providing the kind of practical education that fits their needs, careers, budgets, lives, and families.

I’ll close this article with some wisdom I learned from an Uber driver who was (believe it or not!) excited to hear that I was visiting his city because I was conducting focus groups with prospective college students. He had nieces and nephews who were eyebrow-deep in the college choice, and he told me what he told them:

“Selecting a college (or having them select you) is not a prize to be won; it’s a match to be made.”

And if that’s true — and I think it is — the power dynamic shifts 180 degrees. With students no longer ingratiating themselves in admissions essays and praying to “get in,” higher education is called upon to serve in a way that it never has before.[2] And the possibilities are endless.

"The Beginning and the End" first appeared in Commencement's Chapter 2: Not Just a Pretty Piece of Paper. Learn more at www.CommencementTheBook.com and continue your reading by picking up your copies of the book at Amazon or anywhere books are sold.

[1] Beyond a buzzword, “meeting students where they are” was perhaps the most commonly uttered phrase — totally unaided by the interviewers — during the conversations we had with 100+ college and university presidents. So keep reading in your copy of Commencement; Chapters 3 and 4 dive deep into nuances of serving those students ... where they are, who they are, and how they are.

[2] Wondering whether we’ll discuss the idea of “student as customer?” Don’t mind if we do! Stick around for (or jump ahead to) Chapter 4: The People Imperative.