Student Success Charts

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What charty goodness have I been enjoying this month?

England holds up better

Over the past month there has been a lot of hand-wringing about declining PISA scores. And they do look a bit grim. These are school-level results, but they raise questions about the preparation of future university students.

England has held up relatively well against that international decline, particularly in science. But that resilience is uneven across subjects.

College students, still in high school

Phil recently wrote about dual enrollment and the wake up call it should be for a lot of higher education. But it’s still worth sharing this map to show the proportion of community college students who are still in high school and who are participating through dual enrollment.

The national average of 23% is interesting but it is the variation across states that caught my attention. 61% of community college students in Idaho are dual enrollment high schoolers compared to just 8% in Rhode Island. At the College of Southern Idaho, 71% of its more than 17,000 students participate through dual enrollment.

Dual enrollment growth changes what headline enrollment figures tell us about colleges’ ability to attract students beyond high school. But my interest here is in student support. Who provides advising and academic help when students belong to both a high school and a college, and how do financially stretched community colleges resource that work? In other words, dual enrollment growth changes not only who colleges enroll, but the student-support work associated with that enrollment.

Playing the long game

The effects of investments in education and access to knowledge can take years to show up. The library example below is a wonderful illustration of why the evaluation window matters: some benefits emerge long after the initial investment.

Same classroom, different diagnoses

I keep seeing this pattern in student success surveys: institutional respondents and students locate the difficulties in different places. Administrators, faculty and advisors (in this case) often identify different causes of student struggles than the students themselves do.

In this Tyton Partners survey 66% of advisors and 68% of faculty identify ineffective study skills as a top classroom challenge. That option was chosen by only 23% of students, 40% of whom identified workload anxiety as the top challenge.

Students may underestimate weaknesses in their study approaches. But the diagnosis of causes in almost opposite places has implications for how the issue is addressed. A study-skills diagnosis points toward helping students manage existing demands. A workload diagnosis also invites institutions to examine those demands, including assessment timing and coordination across courses.

More options, more decisions

Seems about right

AI can dramatically reduce the cost of producing options while increasing the burden of deciding which ones to trust, check and pursue.

Who feels they belong?

This result isn’t quoted quite as often, but the gap between boys’ and girls’ sense of belonging in school is quite troubling. Girls report a lower sense of belonging than boys in every country displayed.

For universities concerned about belonging, this raises a question about the experiences students bring with them. Efforts to build connection on campus begin against a backdrop of very different experiences of school.

A historical perspective on research cuts

Research funding isn’t often thought of as a student success issue but for many graduate students it is a critical factor. Drops in federal research funding have been top of mind for many US university administrators in the past year and a half.

But Daniel Gross provides some interesting historical perspective. According to his analysis, Department of Defense university research contracts, historically an important source of research funding, fell nearly 70% in real terms between 1969 and 1975.

The labor market graduates actually face

Increasingly the success of institutions is judged on the extent to which they can get their graduates into well paying jobs. But graduate employment outcomes reflect both the education institutions provide and the labor markets their graduates enter. And that has been, well, brutal. Justin Wolfers over at Platypus Economics explores one angle on this. Net US employment growth since January 2025 has been concentrated in the health care and social assistance sectors.

Women account for most of the net employment increase over that same period. Institutions don't choose the labor markets into which their graduates emerge, and those labor markets affect programs and students very differently.

Judging institutions by graduate employment or earnings requires attention to field of study and labor-market conditions.

The work that keeps on working

Student support often depends on work that rarely appears in a process diagram or staffing plan. An online unit and the main campus may use different CRMs, leaving advisers to copy information manually for students served by both. Or an experienced employee remembering an exception that appears nowhere in the documentation and having to create a workaround for it. This is the hidden work of student success.

The typology below gives names to the different forms that hidden work takes.

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