THE BENEFITS OF BENCHMARKING NON-TRADITIONAL MANAGEMENT PROGRAMS TO INCREASE RETENTION ON HIGHER EDUCATION CONTINUING EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS

Adult learner retention in non-traditional institutions of higher learning is a continued concern for colleges and universities in all types of educational programs. Even though the causes students leave programs and the approaches to maintain adult enrollment differ, the aim of retention is the same, that is to maintain learners in programs. For adult learners to remain in continuing education programs is viable to the community, businesses and organizations, plus colleges and universities. Continuing education program theories and methodologies learned are valuable in terms of specific student learning outcomes for the programs. Continuing education programs need to adjust campaign strategies directed towards marketing enhanced features and benefits of educational programs. Creating phased and long-term marketing strategies for existing as well as new programs will enhance students' perspectives. These strategies will provide students with a viable institutional driven impression of the colleges and universities. Determining such phased long-term marketing strategies can be effectively done through benchmarking. These tactics focus on promoting a predetermined brand and the level at which the strategy should tout the specific benefits particular to the outcome that is to control the enrollment of students. In turn, this long-term strategy should increase institutional benefits received from focused marketing campaigns. The quality of such marketing programs can be developed through data collected from benchmarking partners, coupled with the return on this investment. Benchmarking has the power to legitimize business goals based on high external operations instead of extracting from internal practices and past trends that could be outdated. With external environments constantly changing, new focused ideas are needed for plans to successfully enable assets to conform new expectations to retain adult learners. The importance of this study on non-traditional management programs to increase retention in higher education continuing programs is to draw significance to benchmarking in non-traditional education. Benchmarking data points can be compared to best practices of non-traditional and traditional institutions. The importance of benchmarking can help increase retention in continuing educational programs by utilizing defined practices and qualified metrics. Benchmarking is one of the most powerful business practice tools adapted into metrics of standardized process improvement practices. Researchers performed a literature review in search of data on the different types benchmarking. The purpose of the study is to determine the appropriate benchmarking activity for non-traditional institutions of higher education in an effort towards business process improvement.