The world that awaits today’s college students upon entering is more complicated, costly, and uncertain than it has ever been. Think about the numbers. Merely 65% of pupils express a feeling of inclusion. “In my first year, it felt like chaos to find my place,” said one student with whom I spoke. While 92% of 30-year-olds earned more than their parents fifty years ago, only about half of them do now. Merely 11% of graduates perceive themselves to be flourishing in the five essential domains of well-being: physical, social, financial, community, and purpose.
However, there is still hope: According to a survey, 79% of graduates stated that attending college helped them advance intellectually and personally, 70% mentioned that it provided access to career chances, and 65% added that it assisted them in gaining information and skills necessary for the workforce. Furthermore, in less than ten years, nearly 80% of graduates get a pay gain that balances their net tuition.Note 2 A different pupil stated to me: “By talking to people, I made new friends [and] found out about amazing job opportunities and events.”
The query is: How can leaders in higher education technology and their teams support modern dance students in achieving success in both major areas of their lives and earning a degree?
Let us begin by acknowledging the ways in which technology enhances the educational experience for students. Students expressed the highest level of satisfaction (78%), with their student services portal, (75%), with their learning management system (75%), with software access (75%), and with tech support (68%), out of the roughly 70 touchpoints related to experience tracked in the “Student Experience Snapshot,” a 2023 national survey.
Keeping this achievement in mind, it is obvious what comes next: move beyond just offering and supporting tools. In an era where 26% of students have been diagnosed with depression and 33% of students have been diagnosed with anxiety, we need to form alliances and provide initiatives that boost and improve the usage of technology while also improving the wellbeing of students.Note 4 I provide nine recommendations below on how to use events, training, support services, and digital resources to assist students in locating people, programs, and career opportunities.
1: Understand Students’ Needs
Any new service, program, or technological advancement starts with an awareness of the needs, expectations, and activities of students—and how they are evolving. A mixed-methods approach can be used to intentionally involve stakeholders.Note 5 This could involve using cutting-edge technologies like dscout for activities like picture journaling in addition to more conventional methods like focus groups, interviews, and surveys. Take advantage of this to connect with students who may not be interested in learning or who are not answering questionnaires. For instance, students at Smith College utilized dscout to contribute pictures and notes about their favorite places to focus and where they found inspiration in order to determine what the school’s new library would need.
Make sure you use both objective data—like logins and checkouts—and subjective data—like students’ contentment with the services they are using to log in or check out. Examine student comments on external review and rating websites such as Niche. Next, identify the needs of the students and come up with strategies to address them by using tools like as journey maps and personas. Team members can better align on the experience of each student segment and how to assist by using a Student Experience Canvas worksheet.
2: Help Students Make Connections
Technology may help students find their people, both on and off campus, even while it can also be solitary and anxiety-inducing. Students view their time in college and university through the lens of belonging, which serves as the cornerstone for success in these settings. However, as was already mentioned, over one-third of students don’t feel like they belong, and this percentage is frequently lower for part-time, commuter, and first-generation college students. To assist students in connecting, collaborate with the student affairs and student achievement departments. Students can communicate through text-based communications, social media platforms, event calendars, student organization platforms, and student involvement portals.
Intriguing tools for communication are also developing. One tool that helps students connect over like interests is Nearpeer, which is used at Loyola University in New Orleans and California University of Pennsylvania. According to WGU Labs research, 41% of students who used the app formed a “real life friend” after connecting with peers, out of 91% of students that used the app.Note 7 The Student Engagement Network at Penn State is another example; it’s a program that offers students opportunities to “find your why.”
3: Coordinate Care and Support
Regulations, technology, and changing demographics have increased the complexity of schools and universities. Although there are a lot of new, well-meaning offices, facilities, and programs being developed to help students, students may find it more difficult to navigate through all of the new possibilities. It’s possible for students to receive the “runaround” from one platform, office, or website to another. Why are there differences between the business school, student union, and library’s space booking systems? A supportive atmosphere is a powerful predictor of satisfaction and engagement, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE).
You should search for possibilities to concentrate and consolidate in order to support pupils and put a stop to the runaround. A physical one-stop shop for student support is linked to a three percentage point boost in retention, according to a Rand Corporation study. For instance, Portland State University observed a four percentage point boost in retention after redesigning their student site. Additionally, Montgomery County Community College (MCCC) was successful in modernizing its student portal, which functioned as a proactive outreach tool for students as well as a strong center for support resources.Note
4: Enhance Collaboration
According to a long-term employers poll conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the most sought-after skill in 2020 will be teamwork. However, just 42% of students are content with “working with peers outside of class” or “studying.”Note 10 Even with the availability of excellent collaboration platforms like Zoom and GroupMe, colleges and universities still need to support students in improving their collaborative skills. This could involve training on goal-setting, role-defining, task scheduling, information storage, and progress monitoring in addition to using the tools.
These resources are provided by certain teaching and learning centers (e.g., Carnegie Mellon University, Vanderbilt University, and Harvard University). Through coaching and practical training, you can go beyond this. Technology departments can offer experiential learning opportunities through student employment, which can include internships, capstone projects, and mentoring, in addition to supporting projects with technology and training.
5: Organize Time, Tasks, and Information
The amount of tools, group projects, activities, and deadlines that students must meet will expand, and so will their organizational skills. I spoke with a kid who articulated this perfectly: “You need to have a strategy for organizing things. I didn’t have as much time as I had anticipated because I didn’t have classes every day when I started college.
With education shifting more and more toward online and hybrid media, this becomes even more crucial.Note 11: In order to provide resources and instruction on time and information management, you can collaborate with your student success office. A rising number of calendaring software with AI capabilities are available, such as Motion and Clockwise. Time-management advice is shared by numerous schools and universities, such as Arizona State University.Note 12: You can also direct students to Gohar’s Guide or College Info Geek as further resources.
6: Rethink Communications
Students at all colleges and universities receive far too many emails. During the one-year onboarding period, 1,200 emails were sent to students by just four offices (financial assistance, student accounts, admissions, and registrar). Administrators operate as though all students read their emails, even though on average only 25% to 33% do. This causes confusion when deadlines and events are missed. After evaluating the emails you sent today, you should ruthlessly prioritize and compile your correspondence. When other channels are more appropriate and may encourage greater involvement and persistence, you can use them, such as the college/university app, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, and messaging.
In order to coordinate message and exchange best practices, Purdue University established the Purdue Communicators Council (PCC). In only a single year, the university’s YouTube channel saw a growth from 1.96 to 27.9 million views. Hartwick College concentrated on sending better emails rather than just fewer; students connected with emails that were shorter, easier to skim, and more visually appealing almost five times as frequently. In addition to saving staff time by responding to regular inquiries, chatbots can also benefit students by offering a platform where they can feel more comfortable asking delicate questions than they would face-to-face.
7: Enable Social Impact
Many of today’s students miss out on opportunities to engage in service learning initiatives, despite their desire to change the world. The percentage of students who are happy with their institution’s service learning initiatives is just 52%.Note 15 Many students have ideas, but they don’t know where to start to develop them. For example, the business school’s entrepreneurship center isn’t a good fit for students who want to launch a social justice film series or write a marketing plan for a local organization. Students can’t produce without technology and space. Events and workshops are also necessary for them to develop their abilities, locate partners, and present their work.
The University of Rochester iZone, a place where students can have an impact on the social, cultural, economic, and communal spheres, is one illustration of this. Everything about this involves technology, from the gear and software for producing and interacting to the specialized tools for posting job descriptions, projects, and more.
8: Connect Classes to Career Paths
When students don’t perceive the connection between their coursework and a profession, they get disinterested and lose time. While self-directed search assessments are a good place to start, it’s ideal to find a role model whose route they could take. Regretfully, just 54% of students are happy with their ability to research potential careers.Note 16 Students can interact with career role models through technology and relationships with career and alumni centers. HyFlex classrooms and modern technologies allow you to expand on pandemic-era investments for smooth remote presentations. Get businesses and students to use Handshake to look into internship and employment opportunities. Instruct students on creating impressive LinkedIn accounts that will highlight their experiences and abilities, help them interact with others, and guide their search.
Integrate career planning and development into the curriculum and student experience rather than providing it as an extra for students in their spare time. The “life design” courses at Guttman Community College and the Ethnographies of Work course at Tulane, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Arizona State are a few examples. If nothing else, teach them the art of taking sharp headshots.
9: Personalize the Student Experience
You have the chance to build something bigger than the sum of its parts when you responsibly collect and use data while assisting students in making the most of technology throughout their time in college. If you could find out how many people signed up for a consultation, attended a workshop, read a newsletter, or met with a mentor, that would be ideal. being aware of who carried out these tasks and the relationships between them. What’s superior than that?
Recognizing your next course of action! Georgia State’s use of data to enable proactive advising is one example of this. Through these and other measures, the university has achieved parity in graduation rates across race and income. For more than a decade, it has been going over hundreds of data points per day for over fifty thousand students to choose which ones to reach out to.Note 18 You can anticipate students’ needs in addition to meeting them by collecting and utilizing data.
Putting It All Together
Techies can support students in succeeding and making the most of what their college or institution has to offer at a time when people are beginning to doubt the worth of higher education. Helping students make the most of their college experience involves recognizing their needs, helping them connect, facilitating the coordination of care and support services, improving collaboration, encouraging time and information organization, rethinking communications, fostering social impact, facilitating career exploration, and personalizing the student experience.
