Reigniting Education Journeys with a Personalized Approach: Terah Crews, Chief Executive Officer at ReUp Education

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health, welcoming you to WorkforceRx, an ongoing conversation with leaders and innovators offering insights into creating a future-ready workforce.

It’s estimated that more than 43 million Americans have completed some college credit, but have not earned a degree, cutting short their earning potential and depriving employers of skilled workers.

We’re going to explore efforts to re-engage this “stop out” population today with Terah Cruz, Chief Executive Officer at Re-Up Education, which partners with states and colleges to design and implement re-enrollment strategies.

In addition to a decade spent in the education space, she brings lived experience to this work as a former high school stop out who went on to receive degrees from UNC Chapel Hill, Brown, and Harvard.

Thanks very much for joining us today, Terah.

Terah Crews

Thanks for having me, Van.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

So Terah, to the extent that you can generalize, what are the characteristics of this, quote, some college, no degree group in terms of age, race, economics, and other categories?

Terah

Look, I think the primary characteristic of this population is they’re all of the above. They’re not centered in any one population. This is a demographic that people don’t realize just how big it is. At forty-three million people, that’s more people than AARP and yet they don’t have near the lobbying power advocating on their behalf. This is one in five Americans. And it’s roughly on an average state — some states are bigger than others — but in an average state, this is about 800,000 people.

These are working parents, they’re veterans, they’re first generation students, they’re rural, they’re urban, they’re on the right side of the aisle, they’re on the left side of the aisle. It’s truly a broad swath of the American population. The only thing ,if you really had to boil this down and characterize it, is they tend to be low to low-middle income because they lack that education to sort of move up in the economic ladder. And moreover, because they started school but didn’t finish, they’re disproportionately likely to have college debt and no real tangible gains. So in many ways, they’re worse off than people who had never gone to school at all.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

What do you think is driving the growth right now of this population? Has there been anything in the past couple of years that has changed and made this workforce demographic a more urgent need to address?

Terah

Yeah, I mean, look, this is a population that’s been growing for decades. The truth is, in higher education, we only graduate about sixty percent if you focus on the four years. We’re graduating even fewer if you’re focusing on the two year or the community college population. So this is a population that naturally grows every year as a byproduct of our failure to get people across the line and get them a credential.

Uniquely over the last few years, a few things have changed. Like one, broader economic instability, like rising costs and caregiving pressure, is continuing to create pressure on people’s ability to actually complete what they started in education. But the unique moment in time is finally we’re paying attention to it. Ten years ago, we would have talked about this population like, it’s a niche group. It’s one percent of the enrollment of the institution. We talked about it as a very small population of the re-enrollment that happened every year.

What’s happened over the last ten years, and particularly the last five years, is we’re seeing higher education and government policymakers begin to recognize that this isn’t a niche population. This is a massive population. They’re a population that’s struggling in our current economy. They’re a population that we’ve invested in, if we’re a state policymaker, but have not seen the return on. They’re a population that is disproportionately struggling with college debt.

Those are on the risk side, but yet on the opportunity side, this is a population that’s part of the way they are. This is a population that you don’t have as much brain drain on. They’re rooted in our communities. They’re invested. They have children in our local schools. These are people who understand the value of higher education because they’ve missed out on the opportunities. They have not gotten the job because they didn’t have that credential. Those things are driving an awareness. And then unique to the past year is the demographic cliff is here, and now we have tightening of visa standards which is creating even more pressure on higher education.

So this has been an issue for a very long time, but in this unique moment, the demographic cliff is here, higher education leaders and policymakers are realizing this is the only growth opportunity we really have demographically, and state policymakers are beginning to realize this represents both a risk to my local economy, but also a real meaningful opportunity to impact my workforce pipeline fast.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

So for my day job with Futuro Health, we’re very familiar with this demographic as well as other adults. I’m wondering if you could share your work with ReUp and also what are some of the strategies that you employ in order to bring these adults back to complete their degrees?

Terah

So, the most important thing we see when you talk about these learners is personalization. If you look at the historical “best practice” with the “some college no credential” population, it would have said focus on people who are very near graduation or focus on people who’ve only been out two years. But if you’re only doing that, you’re only addressing about twelve percent of the opportunity.

If you want to address the whole problem — if you actually want to start turning the tide and re-enrolling more people than are stopping out every year — you have to be able to address the entire population. At ReUp, we’re focusing on people who’ve been out for up to twenty-five years and the only reason we don’t go past twenty-five years is most college databases don’t go back that far.

So we’re focusing on personalization of outreach and multimodal engagement over long periods of time to make it viable to support people who’ve been out past just that near-completer or recent stopout. If you can do that, and we can get into the details of it, but if you can do that, if you can personalize and you can support somebody who’s been out ten or even fifteen years and do that, provide that support over some cases twelve, twenty-four months before they ever re-enroll, that’s how you get to a place where you start meaningfully moving the scale and meaningfully making an impact both on enrollments and the workforce pipeline.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Well Terah, your comments make me so curious because I would imagine that the first email, if they even open up an email, doesn’t get to the action. Is this sort of a passive way of putting the opportunity back in front of them?

Terah

It’s all of the above. But let’s get into specifics of how it works. So when we reach out to a learner, first off, we get a list of learners from an individual institution. That individual institution has worked with us or they’re being sponsored by the state to work with us. It’s best when you’re sponsored because you’ve got some sponsorship or coordination from the state, but it’s not absolutely necessary. An individual institution can do this on their own.

Once we get that list, by and large, the majority of those people have never been outreached to, or if they have, they haven’t been outreached to in years. So we append that list with what is available elsewhere within the market so that we learn even more about that learner. And then we add personalized outreach based on ten years and ten million natural language recorded interactions with learners to get to an early interaction that is as personalized and as unique to the learner as possible and most aligned to like the most likely thing to call an initial call to action.

That’s going to create several sort of cohorts. One cohort is going to come back relatively quick. They’re the people who are there and just needed to be called to action to take the initial step. They may work with one of our coaches to navigate some challenges in their life to be able to take that step. They may work with us on unique friction points they have. Or they may take our more automated interactions and use that to sort of support them back in.

Another cohort, a larger cohort, is going to start a conversation with us. They’re going to take time to reorganize their life to get ready to take that step back to school. One of the key characteristics is most of these people are time poor. They have caregiving responsibilities. They have hourly jobs, not salaried jobs. Finding time in their life to make the investment in education and finding the resources in their life to make investment in education takes time to orient towards being able to take that step.

So for us, we first try to figure out who they are, then we’re engaging them. The ones that we can get back immediately, we’re going to get back immediately and then we’re going to build a longer term relationship and that will ebb and flow in time. It might be somebody working closely with one of our coaches for two, three months, and then they could stop and just be supported from our automated content for a few months and then re-enroll. It really varies. And, you know, it sounds so simple, but it’s really complex to think about managing relationships with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people to that level of personalization because everybody has their own unique journey back.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

That’s very helpful to give us, our listeners, an impression of the work of ReUp. You talked about many of these individuals being time poor. I talk about them having very complicated lives and so there was a moment in time in which they stopped out. The time costs of being able to pursue that degree wasn’t as pressing as some of the other things that were happening.

Terah

Yes.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

I’m wondering how that coaching conversation sounds like such that the value of the degree becomes more poignant to them such that they would rearrange their lives so that they could go back and finish a degree. Does the nature of the degree matter? Is it the length of time? Is it the cost of the degree? How do you increase the value of degree completion to the adult that has so many complicated things going on?

Terah

Well, first up, we don’t have a bias towards what degree or what credential they get, and that’s a really important point, particularly when you take that state coordinated strategy. You could have somebody who started an engineering degree, has been out for eight years and go back and get a welding credential at the local community college. Dollar for dollar, they’re both gonna make really good money a couple months out from getting their job. We don’t have any bias on where they go. They could go back to finish that credential. They could go back and do something different. We want to help them find a pathway to a credential that is going to help them move forward and where they want to go in their lives.

That’s important because when we start the conversation with them, it’s really, how are you doing? Where are you? Where is it that you want to go in life? Education is a vehicle to achieving an outcome, particularly for this population. You’re not going to get a lot of people studying French philosophy. You’re going to get people who are naturally pursuing the allied health, technical fields, things that are in very high demand. So for our learners, we start with, where are you today? Where do you want to go? And then whatever educational pathway will achieve the destination, we’re wide open to and have zero bias towards what that is, but we want to help curate and help people make the right decision so that they don’t stop out again and they can get that outcome.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Terah, I’m curious…I’m sure there are a lot of barriers in the way and friction in the way with the way institutions are set up. So as you encourage the adult to go back and finish or pursue a degree or the certificate, then you put seventy-five pages of applications in front of them. I wonder if you’re having an impact in changing the practices of institutions and systems to make it more friendly.

Terah

Yes, 100 percent. And that’s a really important component of this. We’re doing two things simultaneously. First is we’re advocating and we’re supporting the learner in helping to overcome these barriers along the way. Everybody is tagged to a coach and a coaching team. At any point in time if they get stuck or they have a problem because of the very complex way that higher education does anything, they’re a phone or text message away from somebody who’s gonna be there, gonna advocate for them and help them overcome that barrier.

But then simultaneously, we have to work systematically to reduce those barriers over time. You have to do both. So, as we see trends in what learners are getting stuck on, we’re advocating for the institution and showing them how changing those friction points could help more learners get through and ultimately help them get more enrollments.

Simultaneously, we’re increasingly — because we have so much volume and so many institutions we work with now —  we’re able to proactively predict where learners are going to get stuck. When we start working with an institution or start working with the state, we index every policy at that institution and the state. We index every program that schools offer and every policy. That allows us to start analyzing what these policies, what these friction points are, and advocating for change with a high degree of success.

What we find is institutions are more than willing to make changes here to be more open and better aligned to working adults, but they’re oriented towards eighteen year olds. They oftentimes don’t even know what their own policies are and certainly don’t know how they relate to this population. If you do personal advocacy for the learner and then you’re simultaneously helping the schools understand “here’s where people are getting stuck, let’s change these policies, and here’s what your peers are doing, and if you proactively change these, you’ll have better outcomes” you get a level of synergy that really has a high degree of success in mobilizing institutions and states to make change.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Terah, could you just share an example policy that may be archaic, but was maybe set up for eighteen year olds and doesn’t quite work for an adult?

Terah

Two really quick ones. One is transfer application fee for returning students. Why? They’re your students. Why are you charging them this again? You want them to come back and come in. It sounds silly, but a forty or fifty dollar application fee is a meaningful friction point to an adult who’s trying to find the confidence to make this leap back in.

A more specific one that is unique to this is transcript holds for very small outstanding balances. It’s a strong lever to get an irresponsible eighteen or twenty year old who won’t pay fifty dollars to do something. It’s a lever to get them into the office and get them to pay it. It is totally counterintuitive for an institution who’s trying to bring somebody back in who’s going to pay five thousand, ten thousand dollars in tuition this year to be like, “oh, sorry, you can’t have access to your last transcripts because you owe a hundred dollar parking fee.” The policy makes sense when it’s an eighteen to twenty year old. It’s illogical for a thirty year old.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Both of these are great examples because these costs come right out of the adult learners’ pocketbook. I wonder if you can discuss a little bit about solutions for overcoming the cost barrier, the tuition barrier and the ancillary cost of attending school.

Terah

Yeah, so increasingly, we are now advocating and working on scholarships and programs at the state level to alleviate some of these cost barriers for learners. Having said that, a lot of the work we do today is getting better utilization of the financial aid programs that are already in place. You see many states and many institutions offer programs for this population or learner, but these programs are highly underutilized, sometimes because the programs are designed wrong.

They’ll say things like, you can’t have been out of school more than three years. And my response is, great, you don’t want a working mom because they weren’t able to go back to school in those first three years? They had to wait till they actually got into school before they could go back to school. So you didn’t want working moms in your program, right? That was the intent of this policy?

So some of the times it’s navigating for a policy change to make those financial aid programs more accessible and more equitable and more — back to where I started — actually making sense for the adult learners. And then simultaneously it’s working with the learners to actually make sure they’re aware of these programs or they’re utilizing the services on campus to have access. You always need more money to help support this population, but there are also lots of pockets of money that are way underutilized. That’s the best place to start.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

And Terah, I understand you have a success story in New Jersey. So tell us more.

Terah

We do. Look, today we’re working in seven states. We’re excited that we’re gonna announce an eighth very soon. But we really started in New Jersey. This started with, in terms of our state coordinated work, about three and a half years ago. In New Jersey, we’ve had twenty-two institutions sign up. That’s the vast majority of the public institutions within the state. Over the last three and a half years, there have been 14,000 re-enrollments. Graduates are a lagging indicator, but already 1,200 graduates have come through from particularly that first cohort. The re-enrollment rate is three times what was typical of an institution. We estimate we’ve recaptured $73 million in tuition for the institutions, projected to get to

$183 million with the number of learners we have in today, and $112 million in contributed impact on the economy. And that’s just one state.

We have active work in Michigan, in North Carolina and others. In Michigan, we’ve had eighteen institutions, already 12,000 enrollments, already 1,500 graduates there. In North Carolina, ten four-year institutions, 5,000 enrollments, already 800 graduates there.

What is interesting about these success stories, and what we’ve learned is, that when you have a coordinated state strategy that allows learners to move between institutions, and you can get these institutions to tackle this problem beyond their population and with their sort of narrow lens, but rather say “this is something we all care about and we need to help these learners go back to school here” then the impact really starts to increase significantly.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Those are powerful outcomes. So, thank you Terah, for sharing them with us. When you think about the policy and funding levers that matter the most, what’s your recommendation for state policymakers? Is it around completion incentives, credit for prior learning incentives, transfer rules? I mean, you’ve talked about maybe it’s a smorgasbord of a number of changes that need to be made.

Terah

It is. Look, we like to think about it as a maturity model. So all of the above. But everybody has to start somewhere. So what’s the most impactful thing you can do to start? Create a statewide coordinated strategy. Period. Like, start there. Even if you only start with eight institutions or you start with twenty. New Jersey started with eighteen and grew to twenty-two very, very quickly.

Whatever you’re doing, you want a statewide coordinated strategy because instead of individual institutions working, you can take the people who stopped out from all those schools and centralize it into one coordinated database and then you can start thinking about the impact and thinking about movement between schools. Somebody who started at a four-year can finish at the two-year that they now live around the block from. That’s piece one. Everybody should start there if they can.

Beyond that, it’s the things you’ve mentioned: performance funding tied to outcomes with this population, credit for prior learning, reforming credit and transfer, transcript hold policies. When we go into an individual state, we don’t try to come in a hyper-prescriptive way because then you get all these barriers to actually making movement. Just start, and then let’s index everything that’s going on, and let’s figure out what for that state is the right first step.

It’s a journey that we’re on to make our higher education system more suitable and more aligned to the adult learner. Let’s just get started, and then we’ll create a three, four, five year strategy and iterate to great.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Well, we’re so delighted to have had you on this podcast. As we know, there’s a call to action to increase the national degree and credential attainment from fifty-five percent to seventy percent, and I know that there’s a parallel effort going on in California and other states. So, let’s end right here by having you answer the following question. What makes you most optimistic about the future of learning?

Terah

You know, I think we’re in a scary and exciting time. We’re seeing workforce change at like unprecedented speed. AI is going to absolutely accelerate everything in terms of how our everyday work lives are changing. That’s scary for the moment. But in terms of thinking about educators and people who value education and learning, it’s also the thing that’s the most exciting. Anybody who’s been in higher education a long time, we’re trying to tell people, you should care about learning, you should care about education. It’s critical. It’s critical now. You need to be learning continuously. You need to be educating and re-skilling continuously at this pace of change.

The challenge of the moment is not that learning isn’t as essential as it needs to be. The challenge at the moment is how our infrastructure and our systems adapt to meet people where they are and keep up with that speed and that pace. So in that way, it’s a kind of a creative destruction time where we’re having to keep what’s core, keep what’s important and valuable about what education and learning does, while adapting pretty quickly to the realities of the moment so that we’re expanding our mission, not shrinking.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Well, thank you very much, Terah, for joining us today and sharing your knowledge and insights and good works with our audience.

Terah

Thank you for having me.