This spring, a student named Cedric graduated from Forsyth Technical Community College (North Carolina) with his associate degree in nursing. He’d stopped out once before finishing it, and he came back through NC Reconnect, the initiative built to find exactly this population. When he talks about what got him back, he points to marketing.
NC Reconnect gave us the budget to run digital ads aimed specifically at adult learners, part of the initiative’s “Better Skills, Better Jobs” campaign, the kind of advertising most colleges never run because there’s no line item for chasing down someone who already left. Cedric saw one of those ads, went online and filled out a request for information form. That form landed in our workflow.
Our student care team reached out first, then connected him with an adult learner success coach, a role the same funding helped us create, who helped him enroll. What kept him there once he was in, Cedric says, was the holistic support he got through Forsyth Tech Cares, the college’s wraparound student support office led by Shanta Reddick. Basic needs, barriers, the things that quietly knock a student out before they ever finish. Cedric says without that support, he wouldn’t have persisted. He wouldn’t have this degree.
He’s not the only one who needed someone to reach out first. He’s just one of the tens of millions who did, and who got lucky enough that it happened.
Where we actually are
Just over 43 million Americans have some college credit and no credential. Of those, 37.6 million are working age, under 65, up 2.2% from the year before, and that population has grown for at least the last two years running, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC).
Community colleges show up on both ends of that statistic. We’re the largest single source of these stopouts. We’re also the institution these students choose most often when they decide to try again, according to NSC data. No other sector in higher ed can say both of those things about the same population. It means the people everyone is chasing for fall enrollment already know our name.
And still, almost nobody comes back. A little more than a million adults with some college and no credential re-enrolled anywhere in 2023-24, the most NSC has ever recorded. In its own words, that’s still “a relatively small share, less than 3 percent” of everyone eligible.
North Carolina’s version of this problem has a number behind it. Roughly 1.2 million North Carolinians have some college and no credential, and the state has a 2030 goal to close gaps like it. The John M. Belk Endowment, a private foundation, launched NC Reconnect in 2021, working with the North Carolina Community College System and myFutureNC, specifically to go find that population. Statewide, only 2.7% of North Carolina’s stopped-out students re-enrolled in 2023-24. Among NC Reconnect participants, it was 22.6%, eight times the state average, and those who complete a credential out-earn peers who didn’t return by about $2,500 a year. Forsyth Tech has been part of it since 2022. Cedric came back through it.
What’s actually breaking
Cedric’s outreach worked because a funded ad, built specifically to find someone like him, found him first. That’s a real system working exactly as it should, and NC Reconnect’s own numbers prove it. Not every college has a grant behind that kind of targeted advertising, though. The harder version of this problem is the student who never sees any ad, never thinks to look, and has no reason to believe a college wants them back.
A joint study from UPCEA and StraighterLine asked this exact population how they’d want to hear from a college willing to have them back. Eighty-six percent said email. Six percent said they’d want to talk to a chatbot. Jim Fong, UPCEA’s chief research officer, called what he found “a serious relational disconnect” between this population and higher ed. His reasoning: these aren’t the same learners colleges served a decade ago, but the marketing and enrollment processes mostly are.
Cedric’s story is proof the model works when a college reaches out. It’s not proof that we’re reaching out to everyone who needs it. Those are two different claims, and most of us are only making the first one.
Why we start ahead, if we show up at all
Here’s the part that should make this easier, not harder. A Gallup survey done with Lumina Foundation this year found Americans rate two-year colleges far above four-year institutions on access, 68% good or excellent versus 45%, and on affordability, 54% versus 12%.
A stopped-out student isn’t hard to convince that a community college is worth trusting. Most of them already believe that. What they don’t believe is that anyone here is trying to reach them.
What predicts a comeback
Not every stopped-out student is equally reachable, and pretending otherwise wastes a marketing budget. NSC’s own data points to two factors that matter most: how recently someone left, and how many credits they’d already earned. Students who stopped out within the last four or five terms, and students who spent at least two years enrolled full time sometime in the past decade, come back at meaningfully higher rates than the SCNC population as a whole.
That’s a list, and we can already build it. Forsyth Tech can pull every student who stopped attending in the last four or five terms, ranked by credits earned, today. Here’s the test for you. Can your team do the same thing this week? If the answer is that no one owns pulling that list, that’s the first problem to fix, before a single email goes out.
What to do next
None of this requires new legislation. It also doesn’t require the kind of ad budget that found Cedric in the first place. Pulling a list, writing a plain email and putting a real name on it doesn’t cost what a paid digital campaign does. That part, any college can start this week.
- One, pull the list. Every student who stopped out in the past four to five terms, ranked by credits and by how recently they left.
- Two, build a single email sequence aimed at that list. Not a chatbot flow. Plain language, one message: you already started this, here’s exactly what’s left.
- Three, put a real person’s name and phone number on that email, not a general inbox. Recency and personal contact are what the data says moves this population, not automation.
- Four, track this list separately from your regular enrollment funnel. Blend a re-enrollment campaign into your usual dashboard and you’ll never know whether it worked.
Cedric needed someone to notice he was still out there and go get him, and someone to help him stay once he was back. That’s what we’re built to do. The tens of millions of people like him who haven’t seen that ad are still waiting for us to go first.
