Retaining Non-Traditional Students in Higher Education

A Personal Non-Traditional Student Retention Story

It was my high school guidance counselor who asked me if I planned to apply to colleges while at the end of my senior year. I was lucky to have that because that is how I found out there was a recruitment and application seminar that I could go to that would help me fill out the application form for community college. I don’t even remember how I learned of being accepted, but I do remember finding out that I would have to take some placement tests, one for English and one for Math, which I was surprised about.

One of the first things I needed to do was find my way around campus so I could take those placement tests, in addition to finding other locations, such as the financial aid office, registrar’s office, bookstore, and library. I had no car, and the community college was 9 miles outside of town so I also had to figure out how to use the bus system to commute because I couldn’t walk. It wasn’t until I was in my 6th year in community college that I learned I could see an academic guidance counselor to help me through the system and transfer to the University.

How was I expected to know all of this as a full-time student and full-time worker with no person guiding me through this process? I think back about how amazing it was that I persisted through to graduating with my Bachelor’s degree 10 years after starting college and even more amazing that I persisted further to the graduate level based on statistics reported about drop out with non-traditional students.

It has been my own experiences as a student and the setbacks that occurred while being a student, that propelled me to where I am today. I dropped out of and failed several classes, I experienced deaths in my family and changing workloads, as well as financial and transportation issues. These types of setbacks (while not always negative, such as promotion), while navigating the higher education system, motivated my graduate career which was based on research on goal attainment, motivation, and setbacks. These experiences also are what propel me in writing this blog about retaining non-traditional students.

The Worthwhile Challenge of Retaining Non-Traditional Students

Retaining students can be a challenge as they have many competing priorities that can lead to their decision to drop a course or out of school. Statistics show that 40% of students drop out of college every year (Flores, 2024), and the drop rate, although not to the same extent, is reported to continue across years of schooling and is higher for non-traditional students (Huo, Cui, Hein, Padgett, Ossolinski, Raim, & Zhang, 2023).

Non-traditional students being those that are often underrepresented by their backgrounds, such as age, gender, ethnicity, employment status, and family makeup such as being a single parent (Atay, Trebing, 2017; Field, Merrill, & West, 2012; Trowler, 2015). These statistics are important because students who dropout are reported to make an average of 35% less income and 20% are more likely to be unemployed when compared to those who hold Bachelor degrees (Hanson, 2023).

Non-traditional students tend to drop out more frequently than traditional students, not necessarily due to personal characteristics such as resilience, but because of competing demands between their student versus non-student life (Chung, Turnbull, Chur-Hansen, 2017); in other words, non-traditional students’ external environments rather than social integration affect retention (Bean & Metzner, 1985).

For example, many of my students have experienced day care issues, death of family members, and birth of a child. The reason stated for dropping my courses most, by my own students, is their demanding work life. Students in my course have dropped because of job changes such as deployment status or field work that sometimes makes schoolwork inaccessible (e.g., working on a submarine), loss of a job, or modified work duties because of promotion or having to work overtime to cover another employee who is out.

The setbacks students experience often keep them from persisting in the course or in college, despite some of these experiences being short term and only having an impact on their course or academic success in a minor way such as earning a lower grade then desired in a course. Although we cannot always predict what type of impact a setback may have on a student and their coursework, we can use strategies that target the retention of non-traditional students, ultimately helping improve academic achievement and graduation rates for students with diverse backgrounds.

There is a plethora of research on retention across different demographics and countries (Cadariu & Rad, 2023; Flowers, 2004; Gale & Parker, 2017; Gilardi & Guglielmetti, 2011; Hinton-Smith, 2012; Jones, 2011; Montez, 1969; Teague et al., 2018) and more recently research has become more extensive in relation to non-traditional students (Huo et al., 2023; Lehman, & Conceição, 2014; Leonard, 2002; Mubarak, Cao & Zhang, 2022) as universities have become aware of disparities in some areas of education (e.g., STEM programs, see Chang, Lee, & Tseng, 2022 or male dominated fields such as construction, see Owolabi, Ogundipe, Ogunbayo & Aigbavboa, 2023) or the diversity of student populations (Lang & Ford, 1992).

Some basic strategies based on research that can be used to promote retention include targeting communication to non-traditional students’ profile, providing access to support services and resources, and implementing flexible and autonomy focused learning environments.

Target Communication to the Non-Traditional Student

Non-traditional students are often commuters or older students who do not live on campus or work full or part time, thus by nature of their profile, they have less access to student-student and student-instructor interaction (Bean & Metzner, 1985; Sandstrom, 2023), which help foster a sense of belonging and thus relate to retention (Pedler, Willis, & Nieuwoudt, 2022; Van Canegem, Van Houtte & Demanet, 2022). Therefore, it is important to strategically provide opportunities for these types of interactions in the course structure in a way that non-traditional students will connect with. Providing environments that provide cognitive, social, and a teaching presence can help students with their sense of belonging (Buckley, Thompson, Tretter, Biesecker, Robinson, & Hammond, 2024; Chun-Wang, Chen & Kinshuk, 2012) and this can be done by the design of student-student interaction and student-instructor interaction experiences.

Student-to-student interaction

Interaction among students is related to students feeling like they belong, which relate to an increase in retention. This is because a sense of belonging is associated with higher levels of motivation (Freeman, Anderman and Jensen, 2007), the belief in being able to attain something (i.e., self-efficacy; Freeman, Anderman and Jensen, 2007) and well-being (Gopalan & Brady, 2020). Therefore, it is important to implement sustained student-to-student interaction into the course (i.e., cognitive presence; Buckley et al., 2024).

Many students in my online courses, for example, have stated that they appreciate student-to-student discussion boards that are not “busy work” for the sake of interaction in a class, but to propel their ability to be successful in the course. Others have stated that they like when they can work on problems in Google docs together in teams.

There are more interactive technology chat-based ways to create immediate student-to-student interaction opportunities, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, or Discourse Channels that can encourage engagement in learning (Tang & Hew, 2022). However, instructors need to make sure students have the resources to connect and use these tools and instructors have the time to monitor them (Riyanto, Danim, Connie, Sari, Wahidin, Susanto, Anggereni, 2023).

Another way that student-student interaction can help support student retention is by creating interactions that allow students to voice their own insights and experiences, in their own way. This means having more informal avenues for students to have conversations, so that they don’t have to conform to a certain style of communication but can use their own style that honors non-traditional students’ differences in communication, cognitive, and learning styles (in Atay & Trebing, 2017, chapter 1, pg. 15).

Student-instructor interaction

As persistence is key in retaining students, it is important to be persistent as an instructor when communicating with students throughout the course term as it bolsters a sense of community among students and student-instructor rapport (Conroy & Kidd, 2023; Hilliard & Steward, 2019). It is best to communicate the same information in multiple places (Steele, Nordin, Larson & McIntosh, 2017).

Communication can be in the form of announcements, instructions, and feedback on course assignments, both written and verbal, in-person, writing, or using video. In any way that the communication is made, it should be personable to the student (Faulkner, Watson, Pollino & Shetterly, 2021). In some cases, such as an announcement or progress report on course goals, you may want to make the communication short so that the student is likely to read it and get back to you, while in other cases, such as feedback on assignments, you may want to be more detailed in your communication.

This will, of course, depend on the purpose for reaching out to them. In online courses, it is best practices to distribute assignments and require them to be submitted throughout the week (Miller, 2014; Xue, Chen, Lu, Poldrack & Dong, 2011); It may be helpful to communicate with students at least three times a week to create an opportunity for them to be involved in the course throughout the week! Colleges will sometimes state this in their course expectation for online learners (e.g., see SUNY Genesee Community College, 2023).

Provide Access to Support Services and Resources

Navigating a University or College is not innate, but learned by guidance from those who have come before you, those who are there presently to guide you through the system, or learned by the individual student as they work through the complexity of being a student with no outside academic guidance. Forty-two percent of people who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 2015-2016 had parents that had not earned bachelor’s degrees (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019). By providing support services and resources to students at the start of their academic journey as well as throughout their academic journey, we can help retain students as they will know where they can get help throughout their academic journey (Seery, Barreda, Hein, & Hiller, 2021).

Academic support services

Anything that can help support students directly with their academic achievement in course work is academic support and may differ depending on the institution. Academic support services that can help retention include tutoring services, writing development services, supplemental instruction programs, tutorials for conducting research and using course-specific technology. Research supports providing supplemental instruction to students, but has been found especially helpful for students in STEM courses and for those new to college (Achat-Menes et al., 2019; Allen et al., 2021; Dawson et al., 2014; Rath et al., 2012; Zvoch, 2023).

Although, University and Colleges often have these services, students may not know about them. If the University or College does not have the service, there are work arounds for classrooms, such as instructors creating their own list of student resources that students can access or creating their own resources or for classes or developing a new course with curriculum that will address their needs.

Resources

Providing resources that can provide support to students and help them understand the decisions they can make in their own academic environment can support retention. It can include advising support, registration, financial aid, veteran’s services, mental health counseling, career services, and student organizations. I had a student who stated they had to drop my course because they didn’t meet a deadline for submitting tuition assistance vouchers. This could have been avoided with more financial advising support.

Also, because non-traditional students often have the competing demands of work, family, and school, they may be less likely to seek out support and can be prone to anxiety and depression (Burcin et al., 2019; Mowbray et al., 2006; Trenz, Ecklund-Flores & Rapoza, 2015), therefore it is important for us to reach out to them rather than waiting for them to reach out. After sending students emails, stating to them that I noticed they had not participated in class for a week and wanted to help get them back on track along with providing support service information, many often state that they never had a professor care so much.

In my mind, these emails are minimal gestures, but to the students, they are meaningful and can be the difference between the student persisting in your class or dropping out or failing the course. The use of digital intelligent agents that are integrated into a learning management system can help automate this type of support (Thaiupathump, Bourne, & Campbell, 2019).

Implement Autonomy Focused & Flexible Learning Environments

Giving students choices (i.e., allowing for autonomy, according to Self Determination Theory; see Ryan, 2023) in coursework has been found to be supportive to student engagement for students in general (Stefanou, Perencevich, Dicintio & Turner, 2004) and also specifically for non-traditional students (Hollis & Was, 2016; Jeno, Danielsen, & Raaheim, 2018; Snowball & McKenna, 2017), thus support completion and retention for all students.

Although some students report that they do want structure to a course sometimes because they are the first in their family to go to college and they need help figuring things out or because it helps motivate them (Roberts, 2011), they also want flexibility within that structure (Lewohl, 2023). Many students who miss in person classes report that it is due to work and family commitments or the class schedule (Lewohl, 2023), therefore providing flexible options for students is supportive of their ability to succeed in courses and thus retain them. Although not all students can receive credit for the work they do (e.g., see an example of this in Ogilvie & Homan, 2012), creative instructors can create assignments that students can choose to apply their current or future career to.