I’m thrilled to announce that I’m leading an innovative new project, funded by Lumina Foundation, to build a scalable model that promotes students’ continuous enrollment through college to a credential. As I embark on this two-year journey, I want to share what we’ve learned and where we’re headed.
What Is Continuous Enrollment?
Taking a break from college, although sometimes unavoidable, threatens students’ likelihood of graduating and delays the benefits of a credential. Academic momentum is one of the most robust predictors of college completion, a relation that strengthens with students’ age. Several ongoing initiatives seek to create and sustain momentum, such as encouraging full-time enrollment (e.g., 15 to Finish; CUNY ASAP) and shorter, accelerated courses. The goal is to help students complete a credential before life finds a way to disrupt their education.
Continuous enrollment, however, is a retention strategy that uses behavioral science to change college processes and mindsets to facilitate and support uninterrupted student enrollment. First, we’re asking how processes can be simplified, streamlined, and automated to promote students returning each term while staying adaptable to their unique needs. Second, we’ll explore how changes to structures and communications can normalize annual enrollment until students complete their program.
What Is the Behavioral Science Behind Continuous Enrollment?
My inspiration comes from research on behavioral defaults. People tend to accept the default option, even when it’s easy to choose an alternative. For example, fewer than 2 percent of hires in South Dakota public higher education opted into a supplemental retirement plan when it required signing up. After the state switched to opt-out enrollment, participation rose to nearly 98 percent.
Another example comes from a community college where incoming full-time students were given pre-made schedules that included English and math. They found that these “opt-out schedules” built academic momentum, with students more likely to return for a second term and earning credits at a faster pace.
Defaults are just one element of “choice architecture,” which in this case is the policies and procedures for how students gain access to resources. In higher education, we tend to make students sign up for everything without a second thought to the alternatives. In this project, we’ll challenge this status quo and find places where changing choice architecture could shift students’ decisions and promote persistence.
What Have We Learned About Continuous Enrollment?
Our work is well underway, and we’ve already identified several opportunities and challenges to continuous enrollment that will guide the direction of this project.
- The right project at the right time: I’ve spent months speaking with experts and practitioners, and there have been two constants in those conversations: excitement and trepidation. People believe this is a great time to expand upon the work of Complete College America, Guided Pathways, and The Great Admissions Redesign to create streamlined paths through college. Continuous enrollment also feels necessary as enrollments grow due to more states offering free college. Our project is focused on troubleshooting all the challenges we can identify, alleviating the trepidation felt by so many.
- Intentionality of choice architecture: We all make critical decisions about student success (consciously or not) when we decide how to grant access to programs and resources. Recently, I asked college partners to list everything that students at their institution opt into, followed by everything that uses opt-out enrollment. This was an aha moment for many as they saw just how many sign-ups they ask students to navigate, despite the inherent flaws in opt-in enrollment.
- Course offerings: Class availability is also essential to the success of continuous enrollment. Recent research shows that community college students who are shut out of a course are 25 percent more likely to stop out; we hope continuous enrollment contributes to solving this issue. Schools need to leverage data on enrollment and success to predict the sections to offer, perhaps as far out as a year. This will allow schools to anticipate their needs in terms of staffing, space, and other resources. Continuous enrollment also requires flexibility to account for students who fail prerequisites, availability of faculty, and macroeconomic factors that boost or drop enrollments.
- Generating excitement: We’ve heard from practitioners that the success of a new initiative is often predicated less on good design and more on excitement—students aren’t going to buy into anything introduced halfheartedly! That’s why we’re also focused on how we message the value of continuous enrollment to faculty, staff, and students. Luckily, this has been our expertise at Persistence Plus for the past decade, using behavioral science to change mindsets and motivate behaviors, such as seeking tutoring, visiting a food pantry, and finishing college.
What’s Next?
A mantra for this project is “We are all choice architects,” and you are no exception. If you’re thinking about refining programs or resources for your students, you need to be intentional about the choice architecture you design.
How do you do that? I would begin by listing all the programs, resources, and processes students experience, and for each one, indicate:
- Do students sign up for this?
- Are students automatically enrolled into this?
- Is student engagement with this optional or mandatory?
This exercise will give you a birds-eye view of the choice architecture students already encounter at your school and shine a light on where you might change a default option to encourage engagement and persistence. Mandatory processes that students need to sign up for are often low-hanging fruit, but automatic enrollment can also combat the truism “Students don’t do optional.” Removing these small barriers will have a disproportionate impact on student participation and persistence.
