Kalaheo Macadangdang is finishing something he started in 2011, the year he graduated from Baldwin High School on Maui. He is pursuing an associate degree in liberal arts at .
“I decided to take a break from school, which was supposed to be a semester, ended up being a year and a half,” said Macadangdang. He was only three credits shy of earning his degree but life happened. Macadangdang began working at Hawaiian Airlines in 2013 where he is now a flight attendant. One day in December 2017, he got a postcard from UH Maui College.
“I got this awesome offer to come back to school and they offered the first class for free,” said Macadangdang.
That offer is part of a pilot project targeting “stopped out” students—former students who have earned some college credit but no degree. Macadangdang was one of 969 stopped out students identified from UH¡¯s seven community colleges. They had been out of school for two years or less and had already earned at least one semester¡¯s worth of credits.
“We emailed, we sent out postcards, we did phone calls,” said Kyla Wayas, a UH Maui academic counselor. Macadangdang was one of 150 stopped out students who decided to return and who received their first three-credit class for free.
- Read more about the program in UH News: , January 18, 2018
“There was no hesitation,” said Macadangdang. “I was looking forward to trying to get back to school. I did not know exactly when, but this was a big pusher.”
“They just needed that little nudge, okay, I have this opportunity, I should take advantage of it and come back to college,” added Wayas.
There are a lot of stopped out students in Â鶹´«Ã½—about 95,000 between the ages 25 and 44, according to state statistics from 2016. UH is planning a campaign to target about 34,000 of its stopped out students in a multi-year effort to get them to come back and complete their degrees. A community college graduate is estimated to make a half million dollars more over their lifetime compared to high school graduate. That increases to a million more over a lifetime, for a graduate with a four year degree.
As for Macadangdang, he¡¯s only just getting started.
“I have about a year and a half to finish my bachelor¡¯s degree in business administration through and I eventually plan to be a pilot for Hawaiian Airlines,” he said.