Scaling Completion College Services as a Model for Increasing Adult Degree Completion. Lumina Issue Papers

An estimated 46 million adults have some college education but have not completed their degrees. For many, especially those who have accumulated several years' worth of credits, the inability to finish college remains a frustration. If the United States is to achieve its ambitious education attainment goals, many more adults with such experience must finish their degrees. While there is a role in this effort for every college and university, "Completion Colleges" offer an extremely cost-effective route to degrees for students who have substantial amounts of prior credit or experiences that can be translated into credit through prior-learning assessment. Serving adults with some college experience, while widely recognized as important, rarely gets the same attention from policymakers, trustee boards, and the news media as other key issues in American higher education. This paper, supported by Lumina Foundation, highlights the potential of Completion College services to help states, higher education systems, and separately accredited institutions to affordably graduate larger numbers of adults who have stepped out of college. There clearly is a market nationally for the types of flexible, student-centered, outcomes-based degree programs Completion Colleges deliver. In the vast majority of states that do not have a Completion College, this demand is often met by for-profit colleges, which market aggressively to recruit non-traditional students. Completion Colleges offer a public or nonprofit alternative to these students, for whom traditional public institutions are not always well suited. States with Completion Colleges are benefiting from a decades-old service model that is as relevant today as when the institutions were created. The potential for scaling these models is strong and should be explored.