One of the persistent assumptions in higher education is that adult learner success is largely a question of motivation. When adults stop out, struggle academically or decide not to return, we can be quick to question whether they were sufficiently committed to completing a degree. However, after years of working with adult learners and connecting directly with the stories of 50 adults for our book, Beyond the Degree: Stories of Adult Learner Comebacks and What They Teach Us, we have come to see the issue differently. Motivation is rarely the most significant barrier. The adults we encountered had compelling reasons for returning, including career advancement, greater financial stability, unfinished educational goals or the deeply personal desire to become the person they believed they could be. What they questioned was not whether they wanted a degree but whether earning one was possible within the realities of their lives.
For adult learners, that calculation includes whether classes fit around work, previous credits will count, prior learning will receive recognition, childcare can be arranged and the financial investment is manageable. But alongside those logistical concerns is another question institutions may be less equipped to recognize: Is this a place where someone like me can succeed? That question sits at the intersection of persistence and belonging, and it emerged repeatedly in the stories we collected.
Higher education often approaches belonging as something created through a particular intervention, including a mentoring program, orientation experience, student organization or retention initiative. These efforts matter, but students experience belonging more broadly. Recent work from the Institute for Higher Education Policy reinforces the idea that a student’s sense of mattering emerges through relationships, policies, classroom experiences, institutional messaging and organizational culture. We posit in our book that belonging is the accumulation of signals an institution sends about whom it values, whose experiences matter and whom it expects to succeed.
That framework resonated deeply with what we heard while writing Beyond the Degree. Few of the 50 adults attributed their persistence to one program or dramatic intervention. Instead, their stories were filled with ordinary moments that accumulated over time. A faculty member learned their name and took an interest in their goals. A classmate checked in after an absence. An advisor helped solve a problem rather than merely explaining a policy. An employer adjusted a work schedule. Someone recognized that years of professional experience represented meaningful learning. Collectively, these experiences created conditions in which persistence became more possible and likely. The reverse was equally important: confusing processes, inflexible schedules, lost transfer credits and unrecognized learning can accumulate to communicate that an institution was designed with someone else in mind.
The stories also challenged us to think differently about interrupted enrollment. Lilly Uvalle first enrolled at the University of California, Merced, as a first-generation Mexican-American student, but the combined demands of work, parenting, unreliable childcare and other challenges repeatedly interrupted her education. Her desire to earn a degree did not disappear. What changed was the relationship between her available capacity and institutional requirements for continued participation. We think of this issue as capacity misalignment—the point at which a learner’s available capacity at a particular moment no longer aligns with what an institution requires to remain enrolled.
Years later, UC Merced’s Degree Completion Program proactively contacted Lilly, assured her that her credits had not expired and helped her understand a path back. She returned in 2023 and ultimately became a reentry advisor herself. If viewed only through enrollment data, Lilly’s journey might look like a series of stops and starts. Viewed through her life, it reveals something more important: Persistence does not always mean continuous enrollment. Sometimes persistence is the continuity of an intention to finish that survives through pauses and returns. For institutions seeking to reengage adults with some college but no credential, that distinction is significant.
Tara Korfhage’s story illustrates what can happen when institutional design aligns more closely with an adult learner’s life. After leaving college during her junior year, Tara made several attempts to return over the next 20 years, but work, bills and childcare repeatedly took precedence. Eventually, she found the University of Louisville’s organizational leadership and learning program, where prior professional learning could earn academic credit, an online format eliminated the commute and coursework connected to leadership work she was already doing. An advisor listened to her hesitations and helped her see a pathway built around the life and experience she already had. Tara completed her bachelor’s degree, later earned a master’s degree and continued into doctoral study.
Tara had not suddenly become more resilient. That resilience had been present during every earlier attempt. What changed was the relationship between her effort and the environment around her. Instead of expending limited capacity, overcoming avoidable barriers or repeating learning she had already acquired, Tara could turn her experience and determination into academic momentum. Her story illustrates something we saw repeatedly across the book: Adults do not return to higher education empty-handed. They bring what we call “comeback capital”: the knowledge, adaptability, judgment, resilience and perspective accumulated through work and life. Institutions can build upon that capital by recognizing prior learning and connecting curricula to lived and professional experience, or they can overlook it by treating those experiences as separate from higher education.
These stories also have implications for how we study adult learner success. Quantitative data and student stories should not be treated as competing forms of evidence. Institutions need to know who enrolls, who persists, where students stop out, how credits transfer, how long completion takes and where inequities occur. Data identifies patterns and tells us where to look, but it rarely explains the entire experience. A completion rate cannot fully explain why a parent stopped out, why losing transfer credits caused a learner to abandon a program or why one interaction with a faculty member changed someone’s educational trajectory. Data tells us what happened; stories help us understand why.
This reality is one reason we wrote this book. Across 50 individual stories, patterns become visible that institutional dashboards alone may not capture. We found that relationships, recognition, flexibility, clear pathways and belonging matter more than we acknowledge in our everyday practice. For scholars, these narratives can generate better questions about persistence and institutional effectiveness. For practitioners, they can reveal points of friction and opportunities for redesign.
Adult learners demonstrate extraordinary resilience, and their persistence deserves to be celebrated, but resilience should not become an institutional strategy. When we focus too heavily on individual perseverance, we risk normalizing the barriers learners were forced to overcome. The more useful question is not simply what made a student resilient enough to persist, but what conditions made persistence possible and how we can intentionally create those conditions for more learners.
The 50 stories in Beyond the Degree remind us that adult learners arrive with lives already in progress, powerful motivations for returning and considerable comeback capital. Our responsibility is not to test how much adversity they can withstand. It is to design institutions that recognize the complexity of their lives, value the learning they already possess and consistently communicate that they have a place within higher education. Perhaps that is one of the most meaningful measures of an adult-ready institution—not simply whether adult learners can succeed there but whether we have created the conditions that allow them to believe they belong and become the person they returned to college hoping to be.