When I graduated from college in December 2025, I crossed a stage I once worried I would never see. In the months since, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how many students start but never finish. Just six in 10 students earn a degree within six years. While that number is bad enough, the figure is even worse for students like me. It took me nearly 10 years and three universities to finally complete my bachelor’s degree.
This global challenge is called a “completion crisis” — language that makes it sound as if the problem is with the students who struggle to graduate. I would argue the opposite: Students are fine. Higher education is failing many of the students it is meant to serve.
The current academic system remains built around the 18-year-old fresh out of high school, attending full time and able to remain on one campus for four uninterrupted years. That student is now in the minority.
The students most likely to fall through the cracks are those in the new “nontraditional” majority. These are working adults, parents, service members, veterans, military spouses, first responders and disabled or chronically ill students.
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Nontraditional students like us do not need lower academic standards. We need colleges designed around the realities of our lives. In my experience, flexibility is often at the professor’s discretion and not guaranteed. Flexibility must be built into academic programming from the beginning.
I worked full time and was a foster parent while earning my bachelor’s degree. I am also a Navy veteran married to a retired service member, and I live with a rare chronic health condition that took over a decade to diagnose.
What is most noteworthy about my college experience is that it is not unique to me. Among students pursuing a bachelor’s degree, 64 percent of those who are parents or are caregivers of adults are also employed. More than 20 percent of those enrolled in an undergraduate program now report having a disability, and more than 800,000 students are veterans or current service members.
I started my college journey in 2015 while on active duty, then deployed to Japan. The demands of my operational schedule forced me to pause, and I waited until I left the Navy to continue. I returned to school in 2018 after completing my six-year enlistment.
In 2022, I attempted another semester but ultimately dropped out again. I eventually learned I had been living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. That experience is more common than many realize: Half of college students with disabilities are not diagnosed until they are already in college. My symptoms are debilitating. Some days, I can work with less physical or cognitive impact. Other days, a bad EDS flare can land me in the emergency room.
I always intended to finish what I started, an ethic instilled in me by my hardworking parents. Even so, returning to college was terrifying after ongoing health crises led to academic failure. At the time, I did not realize how much difference a shorter, more flexible course schedule could make for a student balancing work, caregiving and an unpredictable disability. But when I committed to trying again, I found an institution built for students like me. I enrolled in 2023, bringing credits from my previous universities so returning did not mean starting over.
The problem was never whether I could do the work; it was that I could not always do it within a strict attendance schedule — a significant barrier for disabled students.
My new four-week, one-course-at-a-time schedule meant that a medical setback would not derail an entire semester. When EDS flares put me behind or in the hospital, professors reached out to check on me, and the school quickly completed paperwork for accommodations.
At my new school, I was not the only student whose life did not fit a typical academic calendar. Most of my classmates worked full time or raised children, and, like me, many had served or were serving in the military. The same structures that worked for me worked for them. The online and hybrid flexibility that allowed me to work around medical issues let parents fit coursework around a job and a family.
Institutions that offer credit for prior learning, meanwhile, let veterans apply the training the military already provided toward a degree, rather than paying tuition to sit through material they have already learned.
Related: STUDENT VOICE: Higher education can — and should — help nontraditional students like me
In December, I earned my bachelor’s degree in cybersecurity, graduating with the highest honors, more than seven years after leaving the military. I just started my master’s program in computer science.
Flexible academic programming does not make an education less rigorous. It allows students with work obligations, military orders, caregiving responsibilities or unpredictable health conditions to not only demonstrate their academic abilities but also complete their degrees.
Too many colleges have old-majority systems and policies. Fix those broken systems, and millions of us will no longer be counted among those students who never finish. We will become graduates equipped to better our lives, our families and our communities.
Alexis Lariviere recently graduated from National University with a degree in cybersecurity, specializing in network defense. She is a 2026 President’s Circle Inductee, COBET Scholar and a U.S. Navy veteran.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about nontraditional college students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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