When Cleveland State University in Ohio began Project Restart—a debt forgiveness program started in 2019 for students who never completed their degrees—part of the idea was to offset the continuous decline in first-year or transfer students.
“We recognized students with some college but no degree as another possible pipeline of students to diversify our enrollment streams,” says Jonathan Wehner, vice president and dean of admissions at Cleveland State.
University leaders also wanted to help educate the workforce in northeast Ohio. Plus, Wehner says, extending financial amnesty to students who left school because of financial reasons was simply the right thing to do.
But it wasn’t easy.
“Comebackers can be a very hard audience to engage,” Wehner says. “Their circumstances may have changed such that they can’t put university studies in the front of their mind.”
Despite the challenges associated with recruiting former students to resume their studies, the economic payoffs—both for the students as well as the schools—make it an imperative.
Estimates vary of just how many students there are with some college and no degree.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center puts the figure at 39 million. Census data show there are 33.5 million when you consider only those 25 and older, but 43.3 million when you count those 18 and older.
Whichever figure one decides to use, it dwarfs the number of potential firstyear college students found among the 3.7 million students who graduate high school annually.
“This population of students is an untapped resource for colleges,” observes Wil Del Pilar, vice president of higher education policy and practice at the Education Trust, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that advocates on behalf of low-income students and students of color.
“Reaching them is a matter of equity, economic-, and social-mobility,” Del Par says, noting that about twothirds of all jobs require some sort of postsecondary degree or credential.
With those things in mind, a growing number of colleges and universities are launching comeback initiatives like the one at Cleveland State University.
For instance, the One Step Away program in Maryland provides schools with grants of up to $60,000 to “identify, contact, re-enroll, and graduate near-completer students,” according to the Maryland Higher Education Commission. The commission defines near-completers as those who have earned 75 percent or more of the credits needed for an associate degree or bachelor’s degree, but who have dropped out or stopped out for 12 straight months or more. Program officials use state driver records to find current contact information for former students.
In North Carolina, the state Division of Workforce Solutions, in conjunction with the state’s community college system, offers grants of up to $1,000 to community college students who are “on the cusp of completing their education or training,” but who are also “faced with an unanticipated financial hardship that may prevent them from doing so.”
And in Ohio, higher education leaders are using Cleveland State University’s Project Restart as a model for the Ohio College Comeback Compact. Wehner, the Cleveland State admission dean, says he hopes the year-long pilot program will engage between 20 and 40 students.
A growing number of individual institutions have also launched similar initiatives. They include Stark State College in Ohio, which allows students to reduce or clear balances owed to the school through its Restart My College Career program; the University of Kentucky, which waives application fees through its Project Graduate program for students who have stopped out; and Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina, which offers support such as food and mental health services to students who are close to completion.
Wehner knows the outreach could be fraught with difficulty. Sometimes, he says, there are “hard feelings or an unwillingness to engage.”
“If we’ve had a student in our internal collections process for months and have been calling about an unpaid bill, they may not be too eager to pick up the phone when they see (Cleveland State University) on the caller ID,” Wehner says. “They don’t know this time we’re calling with an offer for debt forgiveness.”
But Wehner says the Ohio College Comeback Compact will take a different approach.
“One of the lessons we learned is that students who may have not had the greatest previous experience in leaving the university are sometimes more willing to engage with a third party when thinking about coming back,” Wehner says.
Along those lines, CollegeNow, a community-based organization in Northeast Ohio, will serve as a third party to do outreach to former students.
“We worked with CollegeNow to serve as an intermediary for our university pilot if students were more comfortable starting with them to navigate the comeback process,” Wehner says. “CollegeNow is partnering with the institutions of the Ohio College Comeback Compact in a similar capacity.”
Maggie McGrath, executive director of the Higher Education Compact of Greater Cleveland, which is a part of CollegeNow, says her team reaches out to students through emails, text messages, and phone calls.
“Most of the student’s time with us will be spent focusing on things such as past-due balance transfer or referral, application for admission, financial aid, scholarships, enrollment processes, etc.,” McGrath says. “I like to think of us as bumpers on a bowling lane: We’re here as a resource to keep you going down the center of the lane, but you try not to run into us too much.”
McGrath says the initiative will focus on debt forgiveness and collaboration among different schools. In other words, a student who dropped out of School A may resume their studies at School B.
“It’s great that the attorney general’s office is releasing the debt to the schools, but it’s even greater that the colleges are forgiving the debt and allowing students to transfer so that they have more pathways to success,” McGrath says. “Some students may have relocated or want to attend a different program to pursue a new career path. They may want to attend a two-year school to obtain a credential but are unable to do so because of a past balance at a four-year institution.
“This program opens pathways for all of those students to be successful without having past-due balances holding them back.”
While McGrath says she believes the initiative will be “extremely effective,” Cleveland State’s experience with Project Restart shows there is good reason to temper such expectations.
The Project Restart Debt Forgiveness Program began in fall of 2019 with 18 students.
“The upfront costs were small,” Wehner says. The university printed postcards and created a landing page on the university’s website.
“We felt it was important to have a team-based approach to working with the comeback students we were offering debt forgiveness,” Wehner says. To that end, the school used its transfer center to schedule intake appointments for interested students and specialists from the school’s one-stop shop to manage financial aid and reenrollment.
“Each student was required to meet with an academic adviser and have a financial aid plan before we would permit the student future enrollment,” Wehner says. “We had two key individuals who led the work, and a team of folks from our registrar and bursar that supported. Through the semester, each student also had a faculty adviser/mentor that they were required to meet with regularly.
“We also wanted students to take the academic work seriously, not just sign up for the program to have debt forgiven,” Wehner says. “Students were required to meet with an academic adviser and a faculty mentor regularly through the semester.”
Students who returned and enrolled full-time—which is 12 credit hours or more—could have up to $5,000 forgiven. Those who enrolled parttime—which is fewer than 12 credits—could have up to $2,500 forgiven.
The project didn’t stop there.
“Part of the idea of the initial meeting with our transfer center and one-stop shop was to ensure students were connected to appropriate campus resources such as our tutoring and academic success center, our writing center, etc.,” Wehner says. “We also wanted to make sure students had additional support from resources like our counseling center and food pantry if necessary.”
So was the pilot program a success? That depends on how one measures.
According to data provided by Wehner, of the 18 students who started in fall 2019, just one student graduated, nine students completed all of the requirements that were expected of them and were granted debt forgiveness, and eight students did not. CSU forgave $26,195 in outstanding debt and realized $122,110 in tuition and fees.
“At Cleveland State University, we really approached the pilot from the stance that we were going to evaluate ROI based on the number of students who reengaged and hopefully eventually earn degrees rather than focusing on tuition revenue,” Wehner says. “From that standpoint, even one student walking across the stage is a success in my mind.”
Designing an effective program to bring in students who are almost done is not an easy task.
Officials at Complete College America, an Indianapolis-based nonprofit that works to boost student graduation rates, say a key element of an effective program is institutional research on demographics of stopout students.
“To do this research, institutions need to interview or survey stop-out students,” Charles Ansell, vice president for research, policy, and advocacy at Complete College America, and Carrie Hodge, data analyst at the organization, said in a written statement to the Journal of College Admission. “Those responses can help institutions tailor stop-out programs for their student demographic.”
Ansell and Hodge say the same data can be used to create effective prevention programs.
“The most ineffective strategy is not having stop-out prevention,” Ansell and Hodge say. “Postsecondary institutions must have student support programs and tactics to prevent students from stopping out.”
As examples, the pair pointed to three tactics that they say Complete College America has researched extensively and found to significantly improve the rate at which students stay in school and graduate. They are as follows:
15 to Finish: “Most full-time students enroll in credit loads that put them on track to finish an associate degree in three to four years and a bachelor’s degree in five years,” Ansell and Hodge say. “15 to Finish advises students to enroll in 15 credits each semester, reducing the time to a degree. The data shows that students who enroll in 15 credits per semester are more likely to persist.”
Academic Maps: These “maps” outline the courses students will take each semester until they complete their degree.
“The course breakdown keeps students from taking classes that are not needed for their degree of study and keeps them on the most time-efficient path to graduation,” Ansell and Hodge say. “The map also identifies milestone courses that must be completed in that term to stay on track for on-time graduation.”
Corequisite Support: Unlike remedial courses, corequisite support allows students to enroll directly into college-level courses and receive academic support—in the form of customized lab support or mandatory class periods—alongside their regular classes.
So why do students drop out or stop out in the first place?
“Overwhelmingly, affordability becomes the biggest obstacle that students have to overcome,” Del Pilar says. “Many students who are struggling to pay for college have very little room to make a mistake.
“So, for a low-income or independent student, a flat tire or an emergency at home or a sick parent who needs financial support can be the difference between continued enrollment and departing an institution.”
Indeed, among older students, that is, those 23 and above, 42 percent cited financial reasons as the reason they stopped out.
Emergency grants can make a difference, Del Pilar says. He cited data that show emergency grants of just $741 can make students three times more likely to stay enrolled.
“These types of programs become lifelines for students and their education aspirations,” Del Pilar says.
Jamaal Abdul-Alim is a journalist living in Washington, DC.
