Beyond the Numbers: Addressing The Hurdles That Come With Turning Non-Credit Learners Into Degree Seekers

According to the American Association of Community Colleges’ “Fast Facts 2024,” non-credit students comprised 40% of the headcount for the 2022 Fall term. That percentage of non-credit students totals 4.1 million learners. Matriculation of non-credit learners to degree-seekers could positively impact economic growth for individuals and elevate full-time enrollment numbers for colleges and universities. However, the path forward has challenges. 

While non-credit enrollments account for almost half of students enrolled in community colleges, Continuing Education (ConEd) programs are often under-funded and under-staffed. In 2021, Romano and D’Amico conducted a research study analyzing the current IPEDS calculations and the funding challenges it creates by not accounting for non-credit enrollment. The failure to count non-credit enrollments depreciates the positive impact on workforce development and the mission of community colleges. Matriculating ConEd students to degree-seeking students could help balance the scales, but that approach has two challenges: equity and low completion rates in noncredit courses. 

Equity and Low Completion Rates

First, let’s look at the completion rate issue. In an article published in 2020, Xu and Ran indicated that their data could not distinctly identify a simple cause for low completion rates because some courses had significantly higher rates of completion than other areas of study. The two researchers from University of California, Irvine, and Columbia University suggested that factors ranging from program construction to instructor efficacy to learner support services. 

Roughly half of the non-credit seekers continue their enrollment beyond one year, according to Xu and Ran’s research. That’s a loss of nearly 2 million enrollments. And that was after controlling their data set for demographic data, which leads to the second challenge: equity. 

Xu and Ran attributed the popularity of ConEd to lenient enrollment policies, time flexibility, and affordability. In their data, they found the demographic most likely to attend ConEd programs were less likely to have a high school diploma, were in lower income brackets, were academically underprepared, and hence lower performing than their credential seeking peers from the same community college.

Demographic Makeup

In 2018, Achieving the Dream’s (ATD) Price, et al. released a briefing titled, “Creating Opportunity for All: Building Pathways from Continuing Education to Credit Programs.” In it, they dug deeper into the demographic makeup of ConEd students that Xu and Ran identified in their study.  

ATD’s researchers noted the dichotomy of noncredit and credit demographics. Noncredit seekers tend to be Black females over the age of 25. Their credit seeking peers, however, were White males under the age of 25 by double digit percentage points in nearly every demographic considered. 

Solutions

The ATD’s briefing is a summary of the recommendations from a working group of colleges called the Northeast Resiliency Consortium (NRC) whose job was research, review, and share knowledge to help align ConEd to traditional college credentials. While the report contained many recommendations and valuable observations, the overarching narrative is the schools participating in the NRC had the most success when they cleared administrative hurdles for students. The schools who developed pathways and methods of banking credits saw success three times over schools who used other approaches. 

At FundFive, we have tools specifically designed to alleviate barriers to ConEd and Workforce Development course registration and manage student competency attainment. Making it easier for students to register for the courses they need and utilizing a framework to encourage them to grow in different competency areas improves the performance of ConEd and Curriculum programs while helping students overcome their challenges and grow their proficiency in high demand competency areas.

References

Phillippe, K. (2024). Fast Facts 2024. American Association of Community Colleges.  

Romano, R. M., & D’Amico, M. M. (2021). How Noncredit Enrollments Distort Community College IPEDS Data: An Eight-State Study. The AIR Professional File.  

Xu, D., & Ran, F. X. (2020). Noncredit Education in Community College: Students, Course Enrollments, and Academic Outcomes. Community College Review, 48(1), 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1177/0091552119876039  

Price, D. V., & Sedlak, W. (2018). Creating Opportunity for All: Building Pathways from Continuing Education to Credit Programs. Achieving the Dream.