InsideTrack, a student success coaching nonprofit with more than two decades of experience working inside American higher education, recently released results from its California Reconnect initiative that deserve serious attention from every college president, provost, and state higher education official in the country.
Working across 20 California campuses over three years, the program re-engaged more than 25,000 adults who left college without a credential. These students are what researchers call "some college, no credential" learners, a growing population that now numbers more than 43 million nationwide. The overall re-enrollment rate hit 8.15 percent, nearly three times California's statewide average of 2.9 percent and the national average of 2.7 percent reported by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
The driving force behind those numbers was something deceptively straightforward. Someone picked up the phone, sent a text, and kept following up until a real conversation happened.
I know that sounds too simple for a sector that spends billions annually on recruitment technology, enrollment management consultants, and student information systems. But the independent evaluation conducted by Education Northwest backs it up with data that should give pause to anyone still betting on automated outreach alone. Students who received one-on-one coaching returned to college at a rate of 19 percent, compared to just 4.5 percent for those who received outreach, but no personalized coaching support. And while coaches directly engaged only 25 percent of the learners in the program, that group accounted for 59 percent of all re-enrollments, a disproportion that speaks volumes about what these students actually needed all along.
As InsideTrack President Ruth Bauer put it, when someone reaches out with genuine support and walks alongside a learner through the complexity of coming back, adults can not only re-enroll but persist, finish, and carry that credential forward for themselves and their families. California Reconnect's numbers prove it.
The coaches connected students to emergency grants and financial aid resources, navigated campus bureaucracies on their behalf, and facilitated what the evaluation calls "warm handoffs" — direct introductions to campus offices designed to ensure that a student who finally summoned the courage to come back didn't get lost in the same institutional maze that contributed to their stopping out in the first place. The populations who responded most powerfully to this model are telling. First-generation college students, despite representing just 44 percent of those who received outreach, climbed to nearly two-thirds of all learners who persisted after re-enrolling. Hispanic and Latino students — California's largest undergraduate population — made up 43 percent of re-enrollments and 48 percent of those who stayed enrolled into a subsequent term. These are not marginal gains among easy-to-reach populations, they are transformative outcomes among students that American higher education has chronically underserved, under-resourced, and too often written off entirely.
Meanwhile, National University in San Diego took a different but equally instructive approach to the same fundamental problem. Rather than waiting for stopped-out students to find their way back through conventional re-enrollment channels, the institution went back through its own records and identified 146 former students who had already earned enough credits to qualify for an associate degree, without ever knowing it. Through what the university is calling the Near Completers Project, 33 degrees were recently conferred, and for 19 students carrying balances under $2,000, the university forgave those amounts entirely, refusing to let an old bill stand between a student and a credential they had already worked to earn.
NU’s President Dr. Mark Milliron said it plainly: these students did the work, and the institution's obligation to them does not end simply because they stopped attending. That moral clarity — institutional, direct, and long overdue — is exactly what this moment demands.
What troubles me is that both of these efforts, as promising as they are, remain outliers in a sector that has historically been far better at celebrating access than ensuring completion. Tens of millions of Americans are sitting with partial transcripts, student loan balances, and no credential to show for the sacrifice they made when they first walked through those campus doors. Sadly, we have spent decades treating enrollment as the finish line when, for far too many students — particularly those who are first-generation, low-income, or from communities of color — it was barely the starting line.
The institutions doing this important work deserve genuine credit, but we need a national strategy. Policymakers need to fund coaching infrastructure with the same seriousness they bring to recruitment and financial aid. Institutions need to invest in the kind of data infrastructure that makes proactive degree audits not a one-time project but a standard institutional practice. And higher education as a sector needs to finally reckon with the fact that completion is not a metric to be managed when enrollment numbers are down. Instead, it should be treated as a moral obligation that was owed at the moment these students first enrolled.
Those 43 million people didn't walk away from higher education because they lacked the ability or the drive to finish. Most of them left because life intervened and no one came back for them. Thankfully, some institutions are finally beginning to do exactly that, and the results speak for themselves. Now, we need the rest of higher education to catch up fast.
Dr. Jamal Watson is a higher education consultant, professor and associate dean of Graduate Studies at Trinity Washington University and the author of this bi-weekly column. Watson is the former executive editor of Diverse: Issues In Higher Education (now The EDU Ledger) and is the author of The Student Debt Crisis: America's Moral Urgency (Broadleaf Books, 2025).
