The Non-Traditional Student Connection Checklist
Non-traditional students often face ‘invisible’ hurdles that disrupt their enrollment experience. Use this non-traditional student connection checklist to identify where your students may be losing momentum so you can bridge those gaps with the same data-driven strategies that drove 3X more enrollment yield for our partners.
Identifying the Three Pillars of Student Attrition
1. “Solo Navigator” Fatigue
The Problem: Small hurdles feel like a personal test of intelligence when a student has no one at home to help.
The Reality: They aren’t just filling out a FAFSA; they are interpreting tax law for a household that might not have traditional records without any traditional support.
The Outcome: They hit one wall (like a request for “Verification”) and decide, “If I can’t even figure out the paperwork, I clearly don’t belong in college.”
2. Lack of “Crisis” Capital
The Problem: Legacy students have a “call home” option when things go wrong. Solo first-gen students do not.
The Reality: If a student can’t figure out how to pay the $200 housing deposit or how to get a bus ticket to orientation, there is no one to bridge that gap.
The Outcome: Small, solvable financial or logistical “micro-crises” become permanent roadblocks that could have been avoided.
3. The Social “Cold Start” Problem
The Problem: Without parents to help them move in or talk them through the nerves, the social barrier is massive.
The Reality: If a student doesn’t have a “home” waiting for them in the form of a peer group before they arrive, the isolation can be deafening.
The Outcome: They “melt” because the psychological weight of being an outsider is too heavy to carry without a support system.
Non-Traditional Student Connection Checklist
Check off the support systems your campus currently has in place to reveal the hidden gaps where your non-traditional students are most likely to lose momentum.
Note: It is unrealistic (and frankly overkill!) to check all 15 of these boxes. Attempting to do so would overwhelm your staff and create unnecessary noise for your students. The goal is to identify the one or two key gaps in each section where your non-traditional and first-gen students are most likely to drop off.
1. The Solo Navigator (Admin)
2. Lack of “Crisis” Capital (Logistics)
3. The Social “Cold Start” (Community)
Total: 0 / 15
Whether you need to fix a single friction point in your financial aid communication or launch a small, peer-mentor ‘Raft,’ we provide the technical infrastructure and administrative support to get these targeted initiatives off the ground without adding an extra burden to your staff.