AMERICA'S BEST COLLEGES FOR ADULT LEARNERS.

• Author: Klein-Collins, Rebecca

NEARLY A THIRD OF ALL COLLEGE STUDENTS ARE TWENTY-FIVE OR OLDER. YET NO PUBLICATION RANKS THE TOP SCHOOLS FOR THEM--EXCEPT US.

When most Americans think of the words "college student," they think of eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds, fresh out of high school. That's outdated. As of 2018, nearly 30 percent of undergraduates are over the age of twenty-five. They are not arriving on campus with their parents in minivans. Instead, they are coming to college, or coming back to college, after several years or even decades in the workforce. Many still work: nearly half of all undergraduates are financially independent, and more than 80 percent of part-time students work.

Traditional college rankings are not very helpful for these students. Working adults generally don't care about average ACT scores or donation rates of alumni. They need information about what a college or university will do to make it easy for them to enroll, succeed, and finish their degrees. They care about things like affordability, support services, and classes that can fit around work and family obligations. They need to find out if a college is going to work for them as the person they are at this stage in their lives.

This is a radical concept for many in traditional higher ed institutions, which essentially tell students, "If you want the privilege of attending our school, you need to change your life to make it work." Colleges for adult learners flip that script and say, "We've figured out strategies and services that will help you fit learning into your life as it is right now."

That is why the Washington Monthly ranks the best colleges for adult learners and why the magazine partnered with the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning to publish last year's Never Too Late: The Adult Student's Guide to College. These resources are intended to help adults find colleges that will meet them where they are. This year's list of best-ranked colleges for adult learners taps national data to identify schools that make it easy for students to transfer, offer flexibility in their scheduling, provide services outside of banking hours, and make it possible for part-time students to succeed after they graduate.

The colleges that made the top spots suggest that many kinds of institutions can work for adults. Golden Gate University, in California, which takes the top spot for the fourth year running, has a clear mandate to serve adults. The twelfth-ranked Southern New Hampshire University provides online and self-paced options. Regional public institutions are also well represented.

America's most prestigious universities, by contrast, are not. Only one Ivy made the top fifty. While several public flagships do feature on our list, their actual enrollment rate of students age twenty-five or over is very low.

Community colleges are ranked separately. Across the board, these schools make it easy for anyone to enroll, but the best ones for adults offer flexible scheduling and a range of career-focused options. The second-ranked two-year college, Wisconsin's Lakeshore Technical College, offers blended, online, and a range of other distance learning formats, as well as ways to accelerate course completion. Meanwhile, thirteenth-ranked North Shore Community College, in Massachusetts, provides students with clear pathways from course work to careers and allows students to earn credit for what they have learned elsewhere.

Adults who seek out these kinds of colleges aren't the sort of students who have wealthy, well-connected parents pulling strings in the admissions process. They are students who make big sacrifices of their time and resources to pursue their goals. They deserve a different kind of college: the kind that designs programs and services to ensure that retailing adults succeed.

A NOTE ON METHODOLOGY: BEST COLLEGES FOR ADULT LEARNERS

We began with the 3,295 postsecondary institutions in the fifty states and Washington, D.C., that were listed in the Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) as being active in the 2017-18 academic year and had a Carnegie basic classification in 2018 of between 1 and 23, excluding many colleges that only grant certificates as well as special-focus institutions such as medical schools or rabbinical programs. We dropped any colleges that were graduate-only institutions, did not participate in any federal financial aid programs or have any College Scorecard outcomes data, were one of the five service academies (to be consistent with the main rankings), or have closed or merged since 2017-18. An additional 150 colleges were excluded for having fewer than 100 students in any of the last three years in which they were open.

The next sample restriction was to exclude colleges from the rankings that did not have data on all of the outcome measures. First, 249 colleges were dropped for not participating in the College Board's Annual Survey of Colleges, which is key in our rankings. We then excluded 925 colleges for missing data on student loan repayment rates, the earnings of adult (independent) students, graduation rates for part-time students, and the share of adult students. For colleges where at least 75 percent of students were over age twenty-five, we substituted earnings and repayment rate data for all students if separate data for adult students was not available.

Eliminating colleges without student loan repayment rates for independent students is the most noteworthy restriction, as this includes two groups of colleges. The first group is colleges with small percentages of adult students, who are unlikely to do well in our rankings anyway. The second group is colleges that do not allow their students to access federal student loans, which includes a number of community colleges. As research has shown that access to loans improves students' academic outcomes, we are comfortable excluding colleges that have chosen to act against the best interest of students.

Our resulting sample is 2,114 colleges, of which 1,136 are considered four-year colleges (based on Carnegie classification and whether they awarded more bachelor's degrees than certificates or associate's degrees) and 978 are two-year colleges. We show rankings for the top fifty four-year and top fifty two-year colleges. (Another fifty in each category are available online.)

As a final precaution to highlight especially questionable colleges, we used the Department of Education's list of colleges on the most serious level of heightened cash monitoring for significant financial or operating concerns. None of these colleges made the top 800 in our lists.

We used the following eight metrics in the 2019 rankings:

(1) Ease of transfer/enrollment. This is designed to reflect how easy it is for adult students to either initially enroll or transfer in a...