Navigating Higher Education “Nontraditionally”: Opportunities and Obstacles in Post-Traditional College Pathways to the Baccalaureate

Oct 15, 2026

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The article examines post-traditional students who begin at four-year institutions but experience discontinuous trajectories and extended time-to-degree before completing a bachelor’s degree. Guided by Bourdieu’s capital framework, a qualitative study uses data from 40 post-traditional college graduates to identify what hinders on-time persistence and what enables completion. Social isolation emerges as a frequent barrier, intensified by limited help-seeking and financial support. Students overcome obstacles by mobilizing economic resources, building bureaucratic know-how, and forming supportive communities.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages16

Reading Time40 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

River metaphor and degree-completion timelines

Traditional vs. nontraditional framing critique

Post-traditional pathways and systemic challenges

Capital theory and higher-education resources

Study approach and contribution

AERA Open January-December 2025, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 1–16 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584251343847 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2025. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Navigating Higher Education “Nontraditionally”: Opportunities and Obstacles in Post-Traditional College Pathways to the Baccalaureate George Spencer New York University Collin Case Emily C. Chen-Bendle University of Georgia A growing number of students initially enroll at four-year institutions as “traditional” but encounter discontinuous college trajectories and an extended time-to-degree. Much is unknown, however, about these students, whom we define as post-traditional. Using Bourdieu’s conception of capital as a framework, our qualitative study examines what stands in the way of these students completing a bachelor’s degree on time and what helps them to finish. Using data from 40 post-traditional college graduates, we found that social isolation was a common barrier to persistence, compounding other difficulties with help-seeking and limited financial support. Post-traditional graduates were able to persist and overcome their obstacles by activating capital in the form of economic resources, acquiring bureaucratic know-how, and finding communities of support. By elucidating the complexities of post-traditional student experiences, we argue for higher education to embrace new policies and practices that improve how we serve the students often discussed as “nontraditional.” Keywords: cultural capital, economic capital, higher education, nontraditional, persistence, postsecondary education, qualitative research, social capital, sociology The river is a common metaphor used to describe the complexity of pathways through higher education. Bowen and Bok (1998) stated that “the nurturing of talent is a process akin to moving down a winding river, with rock-strewn rapids and slow channels, muddy at times and clear at others”(p. 1). Hence, for many undergraduates at four-year colleges and universities, the path to the baccalaureate is neither smooth nor linear—leaving some to fight against the river currents for a period of time far longer than the four-year window expected for “traditional” college students. Indeed, the timing for bachelor’s degree completion, on average, is 5.7 years (Shapiro et al., 2016), an estimate that has increased over time since the 1970s (Bound et al., 2012) . Still, many students take longer to graduate than available data sources can track enrollment behavior. For instance, nearly one in four bachelor’s degree earners in 2015–2016 finished in over six years (Velez et al., 2019), demonstrating that many undergraduates struggle to move seamlessly through the proverbial river. Despite the widespread use of the “traditional” versus“nontraditional” dichotomy of categorizing undergraduates, this binary framing increasingly fails to account for the diversity of enrollment behaviors and life circumstances among today’s students. Many scholars have critiqued the term “nontraditional” as marginalizing, as it implies deviation from an outdated norm (Soares, 2013), although most college students today can be defined as “nontraditional” in some capacity (Deil-Amen, 2015; Radford et al., 2015) . Instead, we adopt the term post-traditional (Iloh, 2018; Soares, 2013; Spencer et al., 2023), which more accurately reflects students who, although beginning their college journeys as “traditional” undergraduates, experience extended and interrupted trajectories toward degree completion. Although the experiences of post-traditional students remain understudied, understanding these pathways is critical as their prevalence grows. Myriad and nuanced reasons may explain why educational trajectories vary for individual post-traditional students, but the most pertinent challenges are sy

FAQs

How does the study define post-traditional students?

Post-traditional students are those who start college as “traditional” undergraduates but experience extended and interrupted trajectories toward degree completion.

What barrier is most commonly associated with persistence in the study?

Social isolation is identified as a common barrier to persistence, compounding other difficulties.

How do post-traditional graduates overcome obstacles?

They persist by activating different forms of capital—economic resources, bureaucratic know-how, and supportive communities.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Pentious