By Richard MacLeod, Director of SEM at Athabasca University, and SEM-EP Evaluator, Live from #SEM2025
Three veteran strategic enrollment management practitioners, Don Hossler, Ph.D., Dawn Medley, Ed.D., and Luke Schultheis, Ph.D., shared some of their findings regarding an area of study that has long been absent from the research journals: recruiting and retaining online students. myFootpath sponsored this study, and the session, “Exploratory Study of How Universities Organize Themselves to Retain and Recruit Online Students,” is one of three National Student Clearinghouse SEM 2025 Research Award Winners.
The need to better understand online student success is imperative, as graduation rates for online programs are typically in the low double digits. The cost of not retaining online students is enormous, as it often results in multi-year lost revenue to the institution while the student also bears the debt and stigma of non-completion. It is estimated that the overall stop-out figures (including all forms of program delivery) are staggering: 43 million students, plus another 10 million who are deemed “no shows” for their first year of attendance.
In this study, 24 universities with a footprint in online delivery were engaged through semi-structured interviews to determine what their practices were in recruiting and retaining online students. There has been very little research done on this topic in the past, and essentially, these findings will help form the foundation for other research in the future.
The researchers asked questions regarding online learners in the following categories:
Do you have the organizational structure to support online?
Do you track online student success?
Do you have support for students after the traditional workday?
There are three main findings from this study:
Very little, if any, tracking is done regarding online student success. Many schools entered the online marketplace under the assumption that it would open new revenue streams with little additional overhead. The concept of this being “easy money” was internalized, and very little further analysis has been done.
Online students need high levels of service, often outside of normal work hours. Organizations need to embrace these students with higher levels of service, recognizing that most have time constraints and competing family and work priorities.
Financing for online students needs to be a priority. Only four schools in the study used financial aid for online students. Schools need to offer creative financing solutions to help adult students afford and persist throughout their programs.
The presenters went on to suggest some best practices for online students, which really focus on adult learners needing different types and levels of support, including:
Seamless onboarding and possibly concierge types of support—an advisor supporting and encouraging a student through their lifecycle.
The adult learner may need to have their level of self-efficacy monitored and boosted through encouragement and reinforcement of success milestones. Any early “hiccups” in onboarding or within the first course may be enough for the student to stop out.
Schools offering online education need to have a structure to monitor and support these students. Wrap-around service is the preferred model, and the overall online student success metrics need to be monitored and acted upon separately from traditional face-to-face students.
Creating budgetary incentive structures for departments could be critical to support the delivery of online courses and programs.
The presenters indicated that follow-up research is planned. Read the findings by downloading the whitepaper.