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Nearly two-thirds of college students work, and about 40% of community college students work at least 40 hours a week, balancing job, family, and other responsibilities alongside their studies. Some of these students attend college with financial support from their employers in the form of tuition assistance, about 1.2 million undergraduate learners according to the 2016 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study.

Despite growing attention to adult learners and increased focus on employer partnerships, higher education still struggles to meet employers and working learners where they are. But innovative programs are emerging. One such program is Achieve Your Degree (AYD) at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana. A recent evaluation from RAND examined how participation in the program relates to credential completion outcomes for working adult learners.

The story that emerges from the data is simple and useful: when colleges streamline employer tuition assistance processes, working adults are more likely to complete credentials.

About AYD

Achieve Your Degree was not designed as a student success intervention. It did not add tutoring, advising, coaching, or wraparound services. Ivy Tech did not redesign curricula, change instructional practices, or introduce new guidance for employers on how to support their workers as students.

Instead, AYD was created to solve a problem for employers and employees alike: tuition assistance is often difficult to use.

Many employers offer education benefits, frequently under federal tax-advantaged tuition assistance provisions. In practice, these benefits can be hard to implement. Employers face administrative complexity, colleges have billing systems that do not always align with employer needs, and employees often struggle to understand how to access the benefit.

Achieve Your Degree streamlines that process. Program staff work directly with employers to support enrollment and payment processes and to apply existing tuition assistance benefits to Ivy Tech coursework. The program functions as a financial and administrative facilitator, helping employers and employees navigate systems that already exist but are not well coordinated.

What the Study Examined

The RAND evaluation used millions of administrative data records over multiple years from Ivy Tech and conducted a regression analysis to examine whether participation in AYD was associated with differences in credential completion for working learners.

Rather than asking whether AYD caused completion, the analysis focused on whether an additional term of participation in the program was associated with higher likelihoods of earning credentials, controlling for observable student characteristics.

Across multiple credential types, the evaluation found positive associations between participation in AYD and credential completion.

Strongest Associations for Short-Term Certificates

The largest and most consistent relationships were observed for short-term certificates.

• An additional term of participation in Achieve Your Degree was associated with roughly a 70% increase in the likelihood of earning a short-term certificate, compared with similar students not participating in the program.
• After accounting for prior academic performance, participants still showed more than 50% higher odds of completion.

These early credentials, often completed in less than six months, can represent an important milestone for working adults. For many learners, these credentials are a tangible outcome with labor-market relevance and can be a positive step toward additional education.

Positive Associations for Longer Credentials

The study also found positive associations between AYD participation and completion of long-term certificates. While the impact was smaller than for short-term certificates, the direction was consistent: participants using AYD were more likely to persist long enough to complete longer programs of study.

Researchers observed a similar pattern for associate degrees, which require multiple terms. The analysis indicates that continued participation in Achieve Your Degree was associated with higher likelihoods of associate degree completion over time.

Taken together, these findings suggest that a program focused on simplifying financial and administrative processes supported both early momentum and longer-term persistence, even though completion was not the program’s original design goal.

Why the Pattern Matters

The sequence of outcomes is instructive.

• Short-term certificates showed the strongest early associations with participation, helping learners reach an initial completion milestone.
• Long-term certificates benefited from improved persistence.
• Associate degrees showed positive associations as learners remained enrolled and accumulated credits.

Rather than pulling learners away from longer pathways, early credential attainment appears to have supported continued engagement, adding “net new” enrollments for Ivy Tech. For working adults weighing trade-offs between work, school, and family, reducing uncertainty early, especially around cost, may make longer-term commitments more feasible.

Achieve Your Degree operates on a meaningful scale. In fall 2025, nearly 3,000 students were participating in the program, with support from 267 employers. Since launching the program in 2016, more than 12,500 students participated, earning over 7,000 credentials.

Importantly, these outcomes were achieved without adding new student services. The intervention focused on simplifying systems, not expanding programming.

Takeaways

The evaluation does not suggest that addressing financial barriers alone will solve completion challenges or that employer-facing models can replace academic and wraparound supports.

What it does suggest is that financial and administrative design choices matter. Removing friction from how employer tuition assistance is accessed and applied was associated with improved credential completion for working adults.

The findings also highlight the value of examining institutional processes that are often treated as peripheral to student success. In this case, a program created to address an employer pain point aligned with improved outcomes for learners.

The Achieve Your Degree evaluation does not offer a comprehensive blueprint for working adult success. It does, however, provide empirical evidence for the first time that simplifying employer tuition assistance can be part of a broader strategy to support credential completion.

For colleges, the findings underscore the importance of institutional and program design choices that reduce complexity for employers and learners. The business case for employers investing in education is well-documented, and the benefits for learners are clear. For colleges, the returns have been murky. This analysis offers greater clarity: for colleges and universities looking to increase completion rates, facilitating employer partnerships in this way can pay off.

For systems focused on working adult learners, the evaluation raises a practical question: Where do barriers exist in our current processes, and what might change if we removed them?

Answering that question will require more than one solution. However, the evidence from Ivy Tech suggests that addressing even a single barrier (albeit a big one!) can be associated with meaningful differences in outcomes.

Interested in learning more? Check out our conversation with leaders at Ivy Tech on the RAND evaluation.