Getting Ohio adults back into the classroom has long been on the minds of lawmakers in Columbus thinking about workforce needs and college leaders looking for prospective students as the number of Ohio high school graduates is projected to keep declining. 

The state has more than 1.5 million residents over age 25 estimated to have completed some college coursework without ever earning a degree or credential.  

The “Ohio College Comeback Compact,” launched in 2022, was designed to be one potential solution. It targeted adults who had stopped attending college classes and owed money, such as unpaid tuition or parking fees, directly to one of Northeast Ohio’s eight largest public colleges and universities. 

Over three years, participants earned a combined 34 bachelor’s degrees, 57 associate degrees and 18 certificates. The number could eventually rise above 109 credentials as more participants finish programs before the compact officially ends later this spring. 

Still, despite years of behind-the-scenes outreach and collaboration across institutions, the relatively small number of graduates may not be enough to significantly move either economic or enrollment needles. 

As the compact winds down, the program’s relatively few graduates underscore how difficult reaching this group can be while still offering lessons for how to potentially connect with them in the future.

How the Ohio College Comeback Compact worked

Cost and finances are often among the biggest barriers stopping students who were once enrolled in higher education from finishing a degree. 

The compact aimed to help with that. If a student enrolled or re-enrolled at one of those participating schools – including Cleveland State University, the University of Akron and Lorain County Community College – the program would erase up to $5,000 of their institutional debt.

Students’ original colleges would also release their transcripts, or the list of classes they already paid for and completed. Withholding transcripts is a long-time tactic campuses can use to try to collect on debts. When colleges withhold a student’s transcript, it means they can’t enroll in new classes, transfer to another school or finish a degree. 

A 2020 analysis from Policy Matters Ohio found the practice impacts more students at Ohio’s community colleges, which enroll higher percentages of first-generation, older, and/or students of color.

For some of the more than 15,000 eligible Northeast Ohio residents, the compact’s offer seemed too good to be true at first, said Martin Kurzweil. He’s the managing director of Ithaka S+R, an education nonprofit helping to oversee the compact’s work. 

“Overcoming that skepticism was a big focus for the promotion of the opportunity,” he said. 

Yet hundreds of them participated. After launching in 2022, 723 students in total – nearly 5% of all those eligible – began again at a participating school with the compact’s help. 

Ithaka recently published a big-picture look at the lessons that emerged from the compact’s work, where researchers noted that rate is more than double that of Ohio’s total “some college, no degree or credential” population. Most students re-enrolled at the institution where they started. 

Lessons learned from the Ohio College Comeback Compact

Kurzweil said the compact’s institutions made adjustments over time. 

One example: The program initially required participants to enroll in at least six credit hours each semester. Kurzweil said schools soon realized that amount, “for some of the working adults participating, was more than they could fit into their already busy schedules.”

In a survey of about 140 compact-eligible students, the majority said they were working full-time while also being family caregivers, points that align with national findings about students over 25 years old. 

Kurzweil said five of the eight participating schools eventually dropped that requirement. It gave students more flexibility while allowing them to remain on track to earn their credential, even if their pace slowed.  

Kurzweil said those types of changes helped drive a “pretty significant increase” in the number of participants, along with their semester-to-semester retention rates and the amount of credentials they eventually accumulated.

Ithaka’s recent piece about the program’s takeaways also highlighted the importance of collaboration among institutions and evolving data collection methods. 

But perhaps researchers’ biggest lesson from the compact emerged when noting what happened when “institutions reimagine debt as an opportunity to intervene rather than an account to balance,” they wrote. 

The compact’s participating institutions waived more than $600,000 in students’ debt. If campuses had turned this same group over to debt collection offices – which, as Signal Cleveland reported in 2024, is allowed under state law – colleges may have received about $94,000. Ultimately, students who enrolled through the program generated more than $2 million in new total tuition revenue, according to Ithaka’s findings.

This type of debt resolution, then, “works best when it is framed as a win-win for students and institutions,” researchers wrote. 

What adult student recruitment will look like next

Philanthropic funding supported the compact’s pilot program. Kurzweil said Ithaka hoped the project would continue on after the first grant cycle, but the money didn’t get renewed.

He admits the compact’s efforts are “not huge in the scheme of things,” but he is still pleased with the progress.

Now, schools will have to make initial contact with potential students themselves, work that the compact once centralized. He said many institutions will also still offer some debt relief, though not to the degree the compact offered.  

“Each institution will not be able to recruit as many students back as they were all able to collectively,” he said. 

Kurzweil pointed to some of the compact’s lessons that could be adopted to further scale the project’s mission. The initiative created a system that listed previously enrolled students and how much institutional debt they owed across institutions. Ideally, he said, that type of database could be organized and managed by a state agency, such as the Ohio Department of Higher Education.

Having consistent statewide policy around how all public colleges and universities handle re-enrollment and institutional debt balances could help, too. It would “create a more level playing field across institutions,” said Kurzweil.