Today, the “post-traditional” college student is in the majority. In 2012, roughly three-quarters of students had at least one of the seven post-traditional characteristics, according to the National Center for Education Statistics: being independent for financial aid purposes, having one or more dependents, being a single caregiver, not having a traditional high school diploma, delaying postsecondary enrollment, attending school part time, or being employed full time.
The challenge is that higher education was not designed for this diversity, but rather with the needs of only an elite few in mind. Although many post-traditional students attend college, relatively few graduate for a wide variety of reasons, as we detail in the paper.
How colleges can improve graduation rates
We recommend that colleges explore several actions.
They could move away from offering remedial classes that are a blunt instrument with low efficacy and instead offer so-called co-requisite classes, in which students in need of support take more rigorous credit-bearing classes that are paired with some sort of additional reinforcement, such as a small-group seminar or one-on-one tutoring designed to fill in their academic gaps. The City University of New York and Austin Peay offer promising examples of this approach.
Related: 5 innovative strategies to support non-traditional students
Another piece of advice is to move away from lecture-based courses that are tied to the credit hour and instead use competency-based education, in which students progress as they demonstrate mastery. In this system, time becomes the variable and learning the constant as opposed to our current system in which time is held as a constant and students’ learning is highly variable.
The challenge, of course, with this sort of an approach is it flies in the face of decades of processes and priorities in most colleges and universities that are built around the credit hour and passive learning. Undoing this is difficult at best.
And it’s why I left with one other takeaway.
In K-12 education, the last decade has seen significant innovation around personalizing learning—tailoring learning to an individual student’s particular needs to help each individual succeed given that students learn at different paces and possess different background knowledge.
In higher education there has conversely been a lot of innovation around business models, but, relative to K-12 education, comparatively less innovation around learning models. Personalizing learning is sometimes discussed—by leading disruptive innovators like Western Governors University—but for most it’s a fanciful term.
If colleges and universities cannot redesign their processes and priorities—or introduce new models with new and different processes and priorities—then bolting online tutoring on top of their existing model could be a critical sustaining innovation that allows them to capture some of the benefits of personalizing learning to become student-ready institutions.
The reason why is that tutoring is inherently adaptive. Even if a college course can’t slow its pace of learning or accommodate learners with different levels of background knowledge about a subject, tutors can adjust and fill in what’s missing—even if it’s knowledge entirely outside the scope of the class that dates back to earlier concepts a student should have mastered in high school.
If a student is struggling with a different challenge—a sense of belonging in a class or on campus, the ability to prioritize, or other habits of success critical to making progress—tutors can offer the necessary emotional and social support to allow a student to persist and ultimately thrive.
As such, online tutoring can be the gateway to personalizing learning for traditional higher education institutions—and a critical step toward accelerating needed innovation on the road to becoming student-ready institutions.
[Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on The Christensen Institute’s blog.]
Michael B. Horn is a co-founder and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. He currently works as a principal consultant for Entangled Solutions.
- Beyond the gotcha game: Moving from AI detection to verification-first supports stronger academic integrity - September 16, 2026
- Choose encouragement before negativity sets the tone - September 11, 2026
- Building an everyday equitable practice for AI in schools - September 9, 2026