By Amy DiPierro

About a decade ago, Buffy Tanner and her colleagues at Shasta College in Northern California decided to rethink how they reach students who started college but never finished.

The college draws from a region spanning nearly 10,000 square miles across Shasta, Trinity and Tehama counties. Those counties are home to about 55,000 people 25 and older with some college education but no degree, according to census data, fully 30% of the adult population.

“We realized that those students out there were our students that had left us,” said Tanner, the college’s director of innovation and strategic projects. “We weren’t necessarily making it attractive or doable for them to come back as adults.”

So the college created class schedules aimed at fitting the lives of such students, m

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