SUNY re-enrollment program lures students back to finish college:
https://buffalonews.com/news/local/b...5f309702e.html
"The big buzzwords in higher education these days are “enrollment” and “retention” as colleges and universities barely recovered from Covid-era losses face a looming and maybe permanent downturn in the population of graduating high school seniors.
But another word is making a huge difference in increasing attendance at some SUNY schools: “re-enroll.”
The SUNY Re-enroll to Complete program was a novel idea in 2018 when SUNY began piloting it at several campuses to flag students who stop coming to classes and urge them to re-enroll before they face defaulting on school loans.
Six years later, one of the first pilot schools, SUNY Niagara, has successfully used the program to lure thousands of “stopped-out” students back to its campus, including many who didn’t start out at NCCC.
Last year alone, SUNY Niagara re-enrolled 535 lapsed students, 345 of them originally enrolled at NCCC and the rest previously enrolled at other SUNY schools. That represents more than 12% of NCCC’s enrollment of about 4,200 – more than most campuses have increased enrollment by any other means.
SUNY Niagara Director of Financial Aid James Trimboli said the program has been easy to implement thanks to a SUNY-contracted vendor, Edamerica, whose student support counselors do the heavy lifting of reaching out to stopped-out students via email, text and phone calls and offering help with whatever problems led them to stop their schooling.
Trimboli said SUNY recognized that campus financial aid and enrollment offices don’t have the time or staff to contact every stopped-out student one-on-one – but they can flag students who stop coming to classes and get their information to an expert vendor.
Trimboli said NCCC has been diligent about generating monthly reports on students who leave school to ensure no student stops out unnoticed. Edamerica then does the outreach and works with the school to get interested students back on track.
“We have crushed it,” Trimboli said of the program. “Our leading this campaign is a testament to supporting students who are ready to return and finish their degrees.”
A total of 32 SUNY campuses are currently participating in Re-Enroll to Complete, and last year they re-enrolled 19,250 students out of a total of 64,278 identified as stopped out, said SUNY spokesperson Holly Liapis.
Of those who came back, 11,769 students re-enrolled at their original campus and 7,481 resumed their education at another SUNY campus, Liapis said.
That’s an overall re-enrollment rate of 30%, and a return re-enrollment rate of 18%. By comparison, the national average re-enrollment rate for adult students is less than 2%, according to a report by InsideTrack.org.
After piloting Re-enroll to Complete at 29 SUNY campuses from 2018 to 2020, SUNY planned to expand the program to 53 of its 64 campuses in 2021. Instead, the number of campuses using the program shrank to 32 by this year.
But that’s about to change. SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. said last week he wants to reinvigorate the program and expand it for the 2024-25 fiscal year.
The SUNY re-enrollment program will be getting new incentives and a new name: “Come Back to Finish,” King said.
“One thing we worry about in higher education are former students who have a job but no degree, and they are stuck,” King said. “They are still paying for the college credits they earned while they really need an opportunity to get back to school and finish.”
“SUNY is in a position, because we are so affordable and have the programs they need, to provide the targeted outreach and application fee waivers to help those students discover the opportunities we have to offer.”
The Come Back to Finish plan will waive application fees for former students who are less than a year away from finishing their degree.
King said about 5,000 students in SUNY’s most recent cohort stopped out less than a year from completion.
A study from Civitas Learning found that, of more than 300,000 students who left school without a degree, 20% had completed more than 75% of their degree requirements, and one in 10 had completed 90% or more of their degree requirements.
Bart Grachan, SUNY vice chancellor for enrollment management, said “nudging” students who have some college credit but no degree with incentives to go back is a powerful way to reach many who may be regretting leaving school once they are less overwhelmed and have time to think about their future.
“We have found that when students stop out, they almost never reach out for help,” Grachan said. “They usually just disappear, and they’re not sure who to ask, how to ask or they are too embarrassed to ask for help.
“This program is based on identifying them as soon as they stop out and saying, ‘Hey, how can we help you?’ Talk to us about the specific barrier you are facing,’” he said.
The danger of defaulting
The idea for Re-Enroll to Complete came out of another SUNY program called Smart Track, whose main goal was to prevent students from defaulting on college loans, Trimboli said.
Around 2015, SUNY became concerned that its rate of students defaulting on their loans was approaching 20%, Trimboli said. “SUNY recognized the need to do something to combat high student loan defaults,” he said.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, students who take out college loans but don’t graduate are three times more likely to default on their loans than borrowers who complete their degree.
In addition, a new study from Gallup/Lumina Foundation found that 35% of students who stopped out of college and took out loans say the loans prevent them from returning to finish their degree or credential.
Trimboli explained the dangers of student defaults this way:
“On the college side, if your default rate goes up to 21% you will get audited, and if you don’t have a good action plan, you could lose your Title IV (federal financial aid) funding.
“On the student side, six months after they leave school they will start getting nasty messages from loan officers and credit agencies that they are in default, their credit will be ruined and threatening to take them to court,” he said.
Trimboli said he saw the value in the tactic right away and wanted to prove it would work. Sure enough, during the pilot, SUNY Niagara dropped its loan default rate from 18% in 2018 to 13% in 2022, Trimboli said.
“Other SUNY schools followed suit because it was such a success,” he said.
At the same time, SUNY began encouraging schools to reach out to all stopped-out students, loans or no loans, based on earnings reports for people with high school versus college degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, students who graduate only from high school earn half as much as those who complete college.
“We want to encourage any student who stopped coming to get back to school because we know the statistics for students who drop out,” Trimboli said. “We want them to come back and finish what they started.”
Although about half of SUNY schools did not participate in Re-Enroll to Complete, many have embraced the strategy of pursuing stopped-out students as their enrollments have plunged since the Covid-19 pandemic.
SUNY Erie Community College is among the schools that are now trying to catch up with former students who have failed to re-enroll in recent years, said ECC Vice President of Enrollment Management Erickson Neilans.
“This is something that we have not been actively involved in through SUNY’s lens, but stopped-out students are now part of our enrollment and retention plan,” Neilans said. “We are currently collecting data to identify our stopped-out students, and then we will be asking them what are the barriers to coming back and how can we address them.”
Neilans noted that for the vast majority of students, the barrier has to do with money. That’s one reason that Hochul’s administration allocated a big increase in the state’s Tuition Assistance Program starting this year.
SUNY Erie and several other Western New York schools are also piloting financial programs to ensure that students don’t run into a money crisis that could cause them to leave school in the first place.
“Right now the national default rate is about .3%, but that’s based on the Covid-era exemptions” that temporarily paused payments and froze interest charges until September 2023, Trimboli said.
“When default rates start to balloon again, this will become a hot topic,” Trimboli said. “But we hope that because of what we have done here, it’s not going to impact our students.”
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