Written by American National University’s Provost and Senior Professor, Lucas Kavlie
When I completed my undergraduate degree, I started with a date.
I wrote down the month and year I intended to walk across the stage, and then I worked backward from it. How many credits stood between me and that date? Which ones had I already earned that nobody had bothered to count? What could I test out of, transfer in, or document from training I had already completed? By the time I finished mapping my degree, I could see the whole path—every term, every course, every checkpoint. Two and a half years. Not a hope. A plan.
The gap between wanting and finishing
There are over 35 million working-age adults in the United States who have earned college credit but no credential. These are people who started by sitting in seats, writing papers, and paying tuition; and then something happened: LIFE. The credits they earned are still sitting there, unfinished business.
The encouraging news is that people are coming back. More than a million adults who had stopped out re-enrolled in a single recent academic year, the highest figure ever recorded. “Re-enrolling” and “finishing” are two different things, however. The difference between them usually isn’t intelligence, work ethic, or time. It’s clarity.
Here’s what the research says about that. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham (2006) spent decades studying what makes people perform. Hundreds of studies across workplaces, classrooms, and laboratories found that specific, challenging goals produce better results than telling yourself to do your best. “Do your best” gives your brain nothing to aim at. “Finish by December 2027” does.
A distant goal, by itself, is a long walk in the dark. That’s where milestones enter the picture.
Why milestones matter more than the goal
Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer (May 2011) at Harvard Business School had knowledge workers keep daily diaries and then analyzed thousands of entries to find out what separated a good day from a bad one. The answer was not recognition, pay, or a great manager. It was progress: small, visible forward movement in work that mattered to the person doing it. They called it the “progress principle.” Essentially, motivation does not produce progress. Progress produces motivation.
Their principle infers that our job is not to summon more willpower but to build a path with enough checkpoints to ensure that you are never more than a few weeks from your next small win.
For me, those checkpoints were terms. Each one had a number attached to it—credits completed and credits remaining—and each one I finished moved the finish line visibly closer. On the hard weeks (of which there were plenty), I did not have to feel motivated about the degree. I only had to care about the next few weeks.
The credits you already have
The other half of my plan was subtraction. Before I signed up for a single new course, I accounted for everything I had already learned that could legitimately count: coursework from a prior institution, exam credit, and documented training. It shortened the path by months.
This isn’t a personal quirk of mine; it is one of the better-documented findings in adult education. In a 2020 study of more than 230,000 adult students across 72 institutions, researchers at CAEL and WICHE found that adults who earned credit for prior learning completed their credentials at 49 percent, compared with 27 percent of those who did not. Students with such credit saved between nine and fourteen months on the way to a degree, resulting in cost savings of thousands of dollars. Still, only about 10% (one in ten) of students in the sample used it at all—usually because no one told them it existed.
So let me tell you it exists. If you have transcripts from another school, military training, professional certifications, or employer training in your history, ask your advisor what can be evaluated. The best outcome is that you finish a term or two earlier than you had planned. Imagine joining the workforce that much earlier!
To our alumni: the method didn’t expire
If you already have your degree from American National University, this article is still for you because the framework does not retire after your diploma is framed.
I still work this way. When I take on a project—whether a curriculum redesign or an accreditation submission—I start the same way I started my bachelor’s: with the finish date, then the backward map, then the checkpoints. I inventory what already exists before building anything new, and I break the work into pieces small enough that the team can see movement every couple of weeks, because a project with no visible progress is a project people quietly stop believing can end.
The credential was the first proof that the method works, but it was neither the first nor the last time I needed to use it!
Start here
If you are returning to school this term, or thinking about it, do these four things this week:
- Name the date. Do not use “soon.” Establish a month and year and write them down in a place where you will constantly see them.
- Count backward. How many credits, for how many terms, and at what pace? Get a real number that you can use and benchmark against.
- Audit what you already have. Talk to your advisor about transfer credit, exam credit, and prior learning.
- Mark the checkpoints. Decide in advance what “on track” looks like at the end of each term and consistently review it.
The finish line should not move. Most of the time, we just lose sight of it. Put it back where you can see it and build a path with enough lights along the way so that you never have to walk the dark stretch alone.
Further reading
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2006) New Directions in Goal-Setting Theory. Current Directions in Psychological Science (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2006.00449.x). The condensed summary of decades of research on why specific, difficult goals outperform vague intentions.
Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (May 2011) The Power of Small Wins. Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins). The diary study behind the progress principle, and the case for milestones as a motivational tool rather than a project-management one.
CAEL & WICHE. (2020) The PLA Boost: Results from a 72-Institution Targeted Study of Prior Learning Assessment and Adult Student Outcomes (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED609772) The completion, time, and cost data on credit for prior learning.
National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. (June 2025) Some College, No Credential: A 2025 Snapshot for the Nation and the States (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED673396). Current national data on stopouts, re-enrollment, and completion among returning adults.
