The Never Ending Enrollment Decision

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The Modern Learner 2.0 report from Education Dynamics is primarily framed as an enrollment and marketing study. But one of its most interesting implications lies elsewhere. If the report is correct, the enrollment decision may not actually end when students enroll. For a significant share of students, it continues well into their time at the institution.

The report argues that students choose institutions through a dynamic risk analysis involving three factors: cost, convenience, and career. But the more interesting implication is that these same factors may continue shaping decisions after enrollment, making them not just enrollment variables but student success variables.

If the model described in the Modern Learner 2.0 report is accurate—both in the kinds of things students are considering and in the way they consider them—there are important implications for our understanding of student success and how we need to support students.

The three factors shaping student decisions

The report rests on the argument that the three factors shaping student choice—and for some students the decision to remain at a particular college—are cost, convenience, and career, defined in the following ways.

Cost is operationalized as affordability relative to financial risk. This includes consideration of whether tuition, fees, and aid options make the program financially feasible without unacceptable debt or economic uncertainty. In discussing cost, the report includes issues such as tuition, scholarships, and, importantly, transparency about costs.

Convenience, sometimes described as flexibility in the report, refers to whether a student perceives that a program can realistically fit into their life without disruption. In practice, the report often reduces this to questions of modality and whether preferred modalities are available.

Career refers to the degree to which a program clearly leads to specific employment outcomes and economic advancement. It includes factors such as job placement rates, earnings potential, employer partnerships, and industry-relevant curriculum.

In the report’s framing, these are not simply preferences that students weigh against each other. They function more like filters in a decision system: institutions that fail on any one of them are eliminated from consideration. Importantly, the report argues that these factors do not operate simultaneously or equally. Each governs a different stage of the decision process. Together they function as a decision system that students use to evaluate whether a program is possible, workable, and worthwhile.

Students are therefore not simply comparing institutions. They are trying to reduce uncertainty across these three dimensions simultaneously.

A nonlinear decision process

The three-factor model is complex enough on its own. But the report also argues that the decision process itself is non-linear.

The report describes how prospective students repeatedly move closer to and then further from institutions while evaluating their options, rather than progressing linearly through a funnel. Learners continually gather new information, compare alternatives, and reassess fit, with commitment stabilizing only when enough signals—around cost, convenience, and career outcomes—build sufficient confidence over time.

The report describes this style of decision-making as orbiting—a wonderfully descriptive metaphor that captures how students, in choosing an institution, draw near as they consider one aspect, may be pulled further away as they consider another, and then are pulled closer again.

Rather than moving step by step toward a final decision, students repeatedly reassess institutions as new information emerges. The key issue is the dynamism and rational risk weighting of the decision-making process.

The decision doesn’t end at enrollment

But the most striking statistic in the report is this: 28% of students—and 31% of traditional undergraduates—continue researching other institutions even after enrolling.

In the traditional enrollment model, the decision process ends at enrollment. In the Modern Learner 2.0 model, enrollment is only a provisional commitment. For the roughly one-third of students who continue reevaluating their options after enrolling, the image is less orbiting than something closer to Brownian motion—students constantly moving, evaluating, and adjusting their position as new information appears. If students continue evaluating these factors after enrolling, then cost, convenience, and career cease to be purely enrollment concerns. They become student success variables.

Researching other institutions does not necessarily mean a student will transfer. But it does create instability. Switching institutions carries real risks: credit loss, delayed progress toward a degree, and, in some cases, stopping out entirely.

In order to avoid losing students—whether to other institutions or to stopping out—institutions have tended to focus their interventions on mitigating or addressing the academic or personal barriers students are assumed to face. These interventions include supports such as tutoring, advising, early-alert systems, belonging initiatives, mental health supports, and, more recently, career guidance. The underlying assumption is that persistence problems arise primarily from academic difficulty or personal barriers. The Modern Learner 2.0 model suggests another possibility: that some students leave because they are re-evaluating whether the institution is delivering what they expected.

From enrollment decision to student success risk

If this model holds, even partially, student success work may need to expand in three areas.

Cost is not simply a financial-aid issue that appears when students run out of money and require emergency loans or micro-grants. It is a continuous risk calculation that students make throughout enrollment. In this model, affordability and cost transparency extend beyond enrollment and become part of a retention strategy.

Convenience—and the flexibility it relies on—therefore becomes not just an access feature but a persistence mechanism. When students’ lives change, programs and courses must be able to accommodate those changes through multiple delivery options and the ability to move, for example, from online to on-campus formats or vice versa. Without that flexibility, institutions risk losing students. Flexibility therefore becomes structural infrastructure for persistence.

If career alignment stabilizes enrollment decisions, then weak signals about career outcomes—especially as students learn more about a field or as labor market conditions change—may destabilize those decisions. Career visibility becomes a stabilizing signal that helps sustain student confidence.

The model also implies something important about how students make decisions. Rather than leaving because they are struggling academically, many students may be making a rational evaluation of whether the institution is delivering what they expected.

In that sense, the model turns the traditional student deficit model of student success on its head. Instead of assuming that students leave because they lack the preparation or resilience to succeed, the model suggests that students may be making rational judgments about whether the institution is delivering what they expected.

What this means for student success

If students continue evaluating cost, convenience, and career after enrolling, the implications for student success are significant.

First, cost transparency and affordability need to become a more explicit part of student success strategy. The Modern Learner 2.0 model treats cost as a threshold condition shaping whether students enter and remain confident in their decision. Yet institutions often address financial issues only when they become crises, through mechanisms such as emergency grants or stopgap financial aid. If students are continually weighing financial risk, then pricing clarity, financial planning, and transparency about costs need to be treated as ongoing supports for persistence rather than as one-time enrollment information.

Second, flexibility must be treated as a persistence mechanism rather than simply an access feature. Students evaluate whether programs can realistically fit into their lives, and that evaluation does not end once they enroll. Institutions built around rigid modality structures or fixed delivery formats may therefore create instability for students whose work, caregiving, or life circumstances change. Real flexibility—allowing movement between modalities, mixing formats within programs, and accommodating changing schedules—may become increasingly important for keeping students enrolled.

Finally, career alignment and return on investment must be visible and credible throughout the student experience. If career outcomes act as a stabilizing force in students’ decision-making, then institutions need to make the connections between curriculum, skills, and post-graduation pathways clearer and more consistent. This means embedding career relevance more deeply into the curriculum, strengthening industry connections, and ensuring that students can see evidence that their education is leading toward meaningful employment outcomes.

Taken together, these shifts suggest that student success may depend not only on academic support but also on how well institutions sustain students’ confidence that enrolling was the right decision.

A model worth taking seriously, but cautiously

I don’t believe that the Modern Learner 2.0 model fully captures how all types of students make decisions for all types of institutions. The report raises a number of methodological questions, and some of its claims feel broader than the data presented can comfortably support.

That said, I still find the model compelling. It resonates with many patterns that practitioners see in the field, particularly the idea that students are continually reassessing their choices rather than making a single definitive decision at enrollment. Even if the model is only partially correct, it suggests an important shift in how we think about student success.

It also has the virtue of subverting the deficit framing that has long shaped much of the student success conversation. The deficit model tends to locate problems primarily in students themselves—whether in their preparation, resilience, or ability to navigate the institution. In doing so, it can subtly shift attention away from the ways institutions may be failing to deliver on what they promise. The Modern Learner 2.0 model points in a different direction: students may be leaving not because they lack the capacity to succeed, but because they are continually evaluating whether the institution is meeting their expectations around cost, flexibility, and career outcomes.

If students are continually evaluating whether their institution is delivering on these factors, then supporting student success may require more than academic interventions. Institutions may also need to stabilize the conditions that sustain students’ confidence that enrolling was the right decision—because for many students, the enrollment decision doesn’t actually end at enrollment.

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