What Happens to Students Who Fail an Online Course in Their First Semester
A new study tracks 14,000 students through their first failure in an online program. The follow-on effects reveal where retention efforts are working and where they are missing the students who most need them.
When students in online programs fail a first semester course, it can be the single most predictive event for their subsequent college outcomes. A new study following 14,000 students from six universities in the US after they failed their first semester course provides some of the most detailed information yet on what happens to students after they fail a first semester course and what institutions can do to keep them from silently departing.
The study, published in February 2026 in the journal Online Learning, looked at the academic activity of 14,000 students from 6 universities across the US for 18 months after they had recorded a failed course grade. The results were used to contrast the behavior of the 59% of students who did not enroll in any further courses in the following term with those who did return to academic activity.
The First Failure Is a Pivot Point
In addition to these figures, the researchers found that of the 37 percent of students who did return to academics in the following term, only 41% of these students re-enrolled in academics within the 18 months following the failed course. This figure represents the 37% of students who did not return in the immediately following term. Of these 37%, 59% did not return to academics within the 18 months following the failed course.
On the other hand, when students who had failed a course in their first semester of attendance received some form of early intervention or structured outreach (in addition to the normal automated or computerized processes) within two weeks of the failed grade, 71 percent of them returned to academics within 18 months after the failed course. The two weeks of structured contact following a failed course had the greatest use in the study, which the authors say is the most powerful single intervention for students who fail a course in their first semester of attendance.
What Outreach Actually Worked
That the highest-return intervention in the study was the video meeting, which was designed to allow staff to review students’ files with them and develop a plan for their re-engagement, was perhaps the most unexpected finding. Indeed, automated emails, even those that were personalized to the student, returned virtually no gain for the intervention. Phone calls from staff, however, had a large return, raising the re-enrollment rate of students who failed a course in their first semester to 58 percent within 18 months after the failure. Video meetings, on the other hand, raised the re-enrollment rate to 71 percent, and were thus the single highest-return intervention in the study.
My scribbles in a notebook account for approximately half of this article. My scribbles in a notebook account for approximately half of this article.
“Human attention carries as much signal as the content of the conversation,” says Bekele, lead author of the new study. She notes that students who receive a video meeting with academic staff, and review of their entire academic record and of a plan for their re-engagement with study, have the highest rate of return after failure in their first semester of study. Students who receive human attention in the form of a phone call within two weeks of failing a course have a 58 percent rate of return after failure in their first semester of study.
Why Students Said They Did Not Return
Of the 312 students who did not re-enroll after failing a course in their first semester, three primary reasons explained why. First, some students did not know how to find out what they needed to do to recover academically, for example which courses they could retake, how their financial aid would be affected, and how long it would take to get back on track. Second, many students felt that they were no longer college material, or that they had “failed” in some way and were therefore not “a college person” anymore. Third, many students indicated that they had been doing okay in college until the circumstances of their life (work, family, child care, etc.) changed in such a way that it no longer seemed practical to continue.
#3 are outside of a university’s control. But the way a university schedules its classes and the kind of emergency financial aid a university has available can both make or break a student’s decision to re-enroll after a failure.
Programs That Are Doing Better
The university where Dr. Bekele is a professor of education, Western Governors University, reorganized their early intervention strategy around a structured mentor outreach model, dubbed by the university as “Mentor Outreach” that has been in place since 2023. The structured outreach model includes a mentor assigned to every student as they begin their program of study at enrollment. That mentor receives an alert within 48 hours of the following events: when a student who is on an alternate grading basis receives a failing grade; when a student who is on a letter grade basis receives a failing grade for a course. The alert requires the assigned mentor to make contact with the student within five business days of the alert. This contact can occur via phone, email or video conferencing. To date, the WGU model has yielded reenrollment rates for students who fail a first-semester course of roughly 18 percentage points above the reenrollment rate for same programs tracked in the research reported here. The WGU model is very staff-intensive, employing roughly 1 mentor per 60 students.
The model has produced re-enrollment rates after first failure that are roughly 18 percentage points higher than the study’s overall average. The intervention is staff-intensive: WGU employs roughly one mentor per 60 students, a ratio that requires significant ongoing investment.
I have come across a few variations on the graph above. The middle one taught me the most.
“Most interventions fail because the math just doesn’t work,” Bekele said. “But we know the cost of replacing a student is far greater than the cost of keeping them.”
What Students Themselves Can Do
Although after a long time students may still be able to recover academically, the period of time after failing a first semester course is the easiest time for academic recovery. Not only are there processes in place at universities for students to repeat courses and be placed on academic probation, but also there are processes that students can engage in with their academic advisers that can significantly influence their ability to complete their program of study within the normal time. Indeed, research suggests that the key factor is for students to engage with their academic advisers within the first month of the failed course.
The hardest step for a student to take is reaching out to the university. Many fear that contacting the university will expose how poorly they are doing. Just the opposite is true, students who reach out get help, students who do not, leave.
What the Field Should Do
The study shows how online programs not staffing for early intervention are allowing numbers of students to fall through the cracks. While the cost of establishing and running such interventions is very real, it will be less than the cost of, and loss to, the program and student caused by, attrition. The online education field is increasingly able to grow, while sustaining student progress, in direct proportion to the field’s growing willingness to fund and utilize interventions aimed at the relational aspects of online student experience.
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