Stephanie started working at a branch of a national bank in her early twenties. Over the next few years she grew within the company, accumulating technical skills and company-specific knowledge. She enjoyed her job, which aligned with her skills and interests. But Stephanie then hit her ceiling. The next set of skills and credentials she would need to advance her career could only be obtained with a bachelor’s degree. She was now competing with degree holders for open roles—both internally and externally—and she was losing. The job market was telling her she needed to earn a degree.
Stephanie is an example of an in-career degree seeker—a composite of real working adults who are on career tracks in fields like finance, healthcare, and the public sector. These industries have entry points for those without a bachelor’s degree, but eventually require that credential for advancement and higher salaries.
Research reveals that the true value of the four-year degree in the labor market is in the holder’s ability to rise within a firm or to move laterally across employers. Young college graduates earn more money over time as their work experience catches up with their education. In-career degree seekers—many of whom are among the 43M Americans with some college credits and no degree—face the same labor market. But they need a way for their education to catch up to the important technical skills and knowledge they’ve developed through work experience.
Stephanie, like many in-career degree seekers, comes from a lower-middle class family. Her barrier to economic mobility—earning a degree—is remarkably straightforward. Overcoming that barrier is not.
National data reveals that few of these potential students ever seek a degree. Less than 1% of the millions of Americans with some college credits and no degree went back to college and enrolled in a bachelor’s program in 2023-24. They are making a rational choice by sitting on the sidelines of higher education. They invested money, time and personal identity in college once and it didn’t work out. Why should they try again?
For those who didn’t enroll in college right out of high school, but enter as first time students as working adults, the chances they complete are low. Students who start college after age 24 graduate at roughly half the rate of those who enter college right out of high school. Relatively few of these students who enroll ever get to graduation.
And, more importantly from the student’s perspective, those who graduate are forced by inflexible college programs to take years to do so. The average college graduate who first enrolled after age 20 took 8.4 years to earn their degree, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
I’ve had the opportunity to get to know hundreds of in-career degree seekers like Stephanie through my work as the CEO of Duet, a coaching nonprofit I co-founded more than a decade ago. These students aren’t enrolled in college for fun. They don’t care about football games or even making friends. They have already come of age, and are seeking a bachelor’s degree because of their personal experience in the labor market.
As students, they are making a sacrifice to give themselves and their families a better life down the road. They see the value of learning and understand how it will help them advance in a career. Given the work experience they already have in fields in which degrees matter for career growth, these students are much better positioned to leverage a credential in the job market right away, as well as over time.
Despite their enormous potential and the fact that in-career degree seekers have done the “hard” thing that draws the attention of policymakers—accumulating workplace skills—they are largely ignored in the economic mobility policy landscape.
When policy leaders do turn their sights on in-career degree seekers, it’s usually at the community-college level, with a focus on enrollment, not degree attainment. And many policymakers who see the power of the four-year degree in the job market are trying to convince companies to hire more workers without those credentials—a movement which is not moving nearly fast enough for people like Stephanie.
Where can policy leaders who are interested in helping these students start?
- Rethink the In-Career Degree Seekers’ Experience: At the master’s degree-level, universities have developed executive MBAs. These programs are distinct from traditional MBAs, with schedules, content, and support that are designed around working students. The same mindset should be brought to traditional bachelor’s programs, where a 29-year-old with a decade of work experience in a demanding field is offered the same sets of programs and services as a 19-year-old fresh out of high school.
- Care About Time to Completion: In-career degree seekers on average take a long time to graduate because they almost universally have to enroll part-time. In even the best-case scenarios, part-time students take many years to graduate. To solve this problem, policy leaders should embrace competency-based education, which allows students to earn credits by showing they have mastered the content, rather than prove that they were in a seat for a certain number of hours. While debates about the formative power of the college experience may be reasonable with traditional-age college students, in-career students have no time to waste. The most efficient and rigorous path to a degree should be the norm for these students, not the exception.
- Understand and Improve Financing Options: Employer tuition benefits are often an option for working students. But employer reimbursement policies are often inflexible, archaic, or outsourced to third-party servicers (or all three) and often require employees to be able to pay the cost of tuition up front. Also, the incentives for an employee to enroll in a degree program—higher wages and more opportunity outside their firm—typically do not align with an employer’s goals for tuition reimbursement programs. Policymakers should recognize these dynamics and create new and different financing options for in-career degree students.
It’s time for policy leaders who are serious about economic mobility to start caring about the potential of in-career degree seekers. Students like Stephanie can’t afford to wait any longer. Neither can our economy.
Mike Larsson is the CEO and co-founder of Duet, a Boston-based coaching nonprofit that works with students enrolled in online, competency-based bachelor’s degree programs.