Louder for those in the back

Was this forwarded to you by a friend? Sign up for the On Student Success newsletter and get your own copy of the news that matters sent to your inbox every week.

I want to disagree with a post I wrote last year. In response to Tyton Partners' 2025 Driving Toward a Degree report, I argued that higher education had a student-support design problem. Institutions were providing lots of services, students often weren't using them, and I argued that that was a function of them being designed badly. Now Tyton has published its 2026 report. The data have changed but the underlying problem hasn't. If anything, some of the gaps between provision, awareness and usage have gotten worse. At some point, doing more of what hasn't worked stops being a strategy and starts becoming evidence that we have diagnosed the problem incorrectly.

Last year I argued that we needed to redesign student services. Looking at this year's data, I think the problem may be deeper than that. We need to reconsider the model of student support those services are built on. In particular, we need to stop assuming that when students don't use the support we provide, the thing that needs changing is the student.

Provision high, usage low. Let's do that again!

This year Tyton has reproduced what is becoming a familiar and depressing chart showing the provision, awareness and usage of some common student supports.

For some of these services, low awareness and usage aren't necessarily a problem because, for example, they were designed to be used sparingly or in extraordinary circumstances (such as emergency aid) or constitute critical and necessary infrastructure such as public safety or the library.

But in other cases, the low level of student usage is deeply troubling. Only 8% of students use tutoring or academic support (and only 3% use the AI version), only 18% of students use career guidance, only 7% use degree planning tools and 14% mental health counseling.

Now it may be that students are in fact using these services but they aren’t necessarily processing them as being what is described in the survey question. For example, only 26% of students say they use advising but it is often required of students so that number is probably higher, even if the usage is the mandatory once a semester or yearly check in. So usage may be being under-reported.

But low usage doesn't necessarily mean low need either. Take mental health counseling and support, for example. 93% of campuses provide it, but only 36% of students are aware and only 14% of students use it. But a recent United Health Care/YouGov survey found that 69% of college students have experienced some behavioral or mental health issues or concerns in the past year.

So the interesting question isn't simply why usage is low. It's what institutions think low usage means, and how they respond.

Louder, for those in the back

Judging by Tyton's data, institutions are responding primarily by trying to get students to use the services they already have: proactive outreach, awareness campaigns, targeted outreach, and faculty and staff identifying and referring students. It's all about communicating more about existing support in its current form.

Now it may be that colleges and universities are doing different things and the data in the report reflects the way that Tyton has framed the question. They do seem to be leaning into outreach as a solution.

And there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these things. If a student would benefit from tutoring but doesn't know tutoring exists, it makes sense to tell them. If they don't know where to find emergency aid, make it easier to find. But notice the assumption underneath almost every response: the service is basically right, and the problem is getting the student to use it.

So we tell them. Then we tell them again. Then we remind them. Then we nudge them. Then we tell them again through a different channel. Louder for those in the back.

There is something else embedded in this response that bothers me. It puts the problem back on the student.

• If the student doesn't use tutoring, we tell them about tutoring.

• If the student doesn't respond to outreach, we up the frequency of the outreach.

• If the student doesn't see an advisor, we send them a nudge.

• If the student can't find the right service, we build a portal so they can find it more easily.

• If the student is struggling, we identify them with an early alert and refer them somewhere.

In every case, the existing institutional structure remains largely unquestioned. The intervention is designed to change the student's behavior so that they can navigate it more successfully. But what if the student isn't the problem, or at least not all of the problem?

The current focus is especially odd given how much the student-success field has embraced the idea of becoming a student-ready institution rather than expecting students to become college ready. We have changed the language, but I'm not sure we have always changed the underlying model. We call this student support, but much of the intervention is still directed at changing the student rather than changing the environment the student is trying to navigate.

Students don’t experience the organizational chart

Part of the problem is that institutions tend to define student needs through the services they already provide. We have an advising office, so we identify advising needs. We have a tutoring center, so we identify tutoring needs. We have career services, financial aid, counseling and registration, each with its own staff, systems, processes and measures. Students don't experience college that way. They experience problems and goals that routinely cross those boundaries.

For example, a student may be prevented from registering until she has paid for her student health insurance. But she can’t pay for her health insurance until she gets her financial aid. And she can’t get her financial aid until she registers.

Students experience problems horizontally, while institutions organize support vertically. The result is that what we call a "student support system" often isn't really a system from the student's perspective. It is a collection of services reflecting the way the institution has divided responsibility. And then we measure whether students successfully find and use those services rather than whether the institution successfully solved the student's problem.

Some of what we call student support may therefore be functioning as a workaround for problems elsewhere in the institution. Advising helps students navigate complicated requirements. Financial-aid staff help them navigate complicated financial-aid processes. Tutoring helps them succeed in courses in which they are struggling. Sometimes those supports are exactly what students need, but sometimes the more useful question is whether we can fix whatever is creating the need for the workaround.

We keep doing what we’re built to do

The career-readiness data in the Tyton report (which I wrote about on the weekend) provide an almost perfect illustration. Institutions themselves rate real-world/project-based learning, embedded career exploration and guaranteed internships as the three most impactful practices. Yet guaranteed internships are among the least commonly provided. Meanwhile, job fairs and resume reviews are ubiquitous despite being rated as considerably less impactful.

Why do we do this? Because institutions have capacity, staff, budgets, processes and organizational structures built around certain activities. A career center can run another job fair or review another resume. But creating guaranteed internships for every student requires employer partnerships, academic involvement, coordination, perhaps money, curricular change and institutional ownership beyond the career center. In other words, institutional capacity is path dependent. Once we have created offices, hired staff, bought systems and established processes around a particular model of support, the easiest thing to do is more of it.

That helps explain something that otherwise looks irrational in the Tyton data: institutions can simultaneously believe that one set of practices is more impactful while disproportionately providing another set. We don't necessarily do what works best. We do what our existing structures make easiest to do.

An alternative approach: three ways to respond to a student success problem

These possibilities aren't mutually exclusive. Sometimes the answer genuinely is more outreach, sometimes it's a better service. But we shouldn't default to communication simply because it is familiar, relatively easy, and doesn't require us to rethink how we currently do things. The same principle applies to AI: before we use agents to help students navigate the maze, we should ask how much of the maze needs to exist.

Why methods like participatory design, design thinking or student journey maps matter

Design thinking, participatory design and service-design methods such as student journey mapping differ in important ways, but they share something that matters here: they force us to start with the problem rather than the existing solution.

What is a student trying to accomplish, and what is getting in the way? This is almost the opposite of where much student-success practice and infrastructure starts, with the services and solutions we already have. When students don't use them, it is remarkably easy to interpret the student's behavior as the problem and better communication as the solution. Design methods reverse the sequence: start with the student's goal and experience, identify what is getting in the way, and only then decide whether the answer is better communication, a redesigned service, or redesigning the experience that created the need.

Let’s stop making students more aware of workarounds

I wrote last year that student support had a design problem. A year later, Tyton is still finding enormous gaps between the services institutions provide, students' awareness of them and their actual use. We can respond by increasing outreach again. Some of that will help. We can build better portals and send better nudges. But if students continue to struggle to navigate the institution, we should be careful about treating their failure to navigate it as the problem.

At some point, doing more of what hasn't worked stops being a strategy. The more interesting questions start further upstream. What is the student trying to accomplish? Where does the experience break down? Why does the problem exist? And what would we build if we started with that experience rather than with the services and organizational structures we already have?

Sometimes the answer will be better communication. Sometimes it will be better advising, tutoring, counseling or career services. Sometimes it will mean redesigning those services. And sometimes the best student support is the support students no longer need because we fixed the thing that was creating the problem.

In keeping with current student-success practice, I have diagnosed my newsletter's growth problem as an awareness problem. Please help with some proactive outreach by forwarding this to someone who might enjoy it. If that fails, expect a portal.

Thanks for being a subscriber.