For many students, being admitted to college feels like the hard part is over. The acceptance letter arrives, the excitement builds and families start to picture the future ahead. Yet for thousands each year, that moment of celebration quietly fades into uncertainty. Somewhere between acceptance and arrival, momentum is lost.
Institutions feel it, too. Despite strong marketing plans to attract applicants and thoughtful onboarding for enrolled students, many struggle to maintain connection during the critical space in between. Competing demands, financial barriers and incomplete paperwork chip away at intent until students simply don’t show up ‒ not because they don’t want to, but because no one had the time, tools or soft skills to keep them moving forward.
This brief explores what happens when those “micro-gaps” go unfilled ‒ the ripple effects on students, schools and communities ‒ and how proactive, personalized outreach can transform moments of pause into meaningful progress.
The road that stops too soon
Admission should be a beginning, not an ending. Yet every year, a significant share of students who are admitted ‒ or who have already attended ‒ never arrive for their next term. Nationally, 10-40% of admitted or committed students do not enroll. In traditional semester calendars, this is often called summer melt; in reality, it’s an enrollment drop-off that can happen between any term style.
For students, this means lost progress, wasted effort and financial risk. For communities, a loss of thriving economies and future leadership. For institutions, missed revenue, lower yield and declining persistence rates.
This inflation disparity has not gone unnoticed ‒ especially since, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute, middle-class wages have been stagnant over the same period of time, despite large increases in economic productivity.
To make up the funding gap, students and families have turned to borrowing, which college financial aid offices help facilitate. But attitudes are changing about taking on student debt and the prospect of paying it back.
According to statistics from the Education Data Initiative, more than 43 million borrowers have student loan debt totaling $1.774 trillion ‒ a record high ‒ and more than 92% of that comes from federal loans. The average federal student loan balance is $37,717.
A survey by Trellis Company suggests rising feelings of stress, anxiety and even despair among student loan borrowers, with 62% of respondents saying they have more debt than expected, that the total is unmanageable and that they doubt any portion of their debt will be forgiven.
If students are souring on borrowing, how to bridge the funding gap?
