As the enrollment cliff, fueled by declining birthrates and fewer students graduating from high school, continues to challenge colleges and universities to find new enrollment and revenue streams, one area of opportunity is increasing the enrollment of adult learners in on-campus, hybrid, and online programs. Colleges, like Northeast Religious University, an independent, nonprofit and tuition-driven institution, are uniquely challenged because of their dependence on tuition dollars to remain open. Since 2016, nearly 100 institutions in the United States have closed or merged with other institutions of higher education. Using an adapted version of Tinto's Model of Institutional Departure (Tinto, 1993), the goal was to better understand adult learner persistence from the perspective of currently enrolled adult learners and then make recommendations for colleges and universities to follow as they develop programs and services to support nontraditional students on their campuses. Semi-structured interviews were conducted while engaging in an interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) study to develop a deeper understanding of the adult learners' lived experiences. Six themes arose from an analysis of the interviews that served as potential situational, dispositional, and/or institutional barriers to the persistence of adult learners, and their finances, time to degree, orientation, high attentiveness/personal touch, social and emotional, and lack of support. As colleges and universities look to adult learners more in their strategic enrollment management plans, they should address these themes when examining their student support systems that were typically built to support traditional-aged college students. Enrollment managers reference this study as they develop pathways and outcomes for adult learner persistence and retention programs geared at nontraditional student success. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]