This Week in Student Success

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Great British Bake Off is back on our screens here in the US, and I get to ponder whether I should spend more time perfecting different types of sponge, in case I’m ever asked to make a cake without a recipe in a technical challenge in GBBO: EdTech & Student Success Edition.

This week, a few questions about what our student success numbers actually tell us—and whether we are connecting institutional gains to students’ experiences.

AI is saving time. What are students getting?

Last weekend over at Interesting Reads This Week I wrote about the Inside Higher Education 2026 Survey of College and University Chief Academic Officers. There is also an interesting student success angle: 23% report using AI for student advising and support, up from 15% last year, and 28% for predictive analytics. Some chatbot use presumably also involves student support.

Yet only 10% selected student advising and support among their top three areas where AI is delivering tangible value, compared with 39% for employee productivity and 36% for administrative efficiency.

The interesting question is where those productivity gains end up. If AI saves an adviser time, does that mean students get help sooner, more sustained attention, or fewer administrative hurdles? And would the institution capture those student benefits, or record only the time saved?

Provosts also give their institutions high marks for advising and other student support, although combining “very effective” with “somewhat effective” makes that confidence look more emphatic than it is.

These answers leave a gap between adopting AI, reporting institutional benefits and demonstrating benefits for students. I would like to see more evidence connecting the three.

What got you here won’t get you there

A new report on the demographic dip from the Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah provides some interesting insight into the growing importance of student retention in US higher education.

Starting in 2029, Utah’s population of 18–24-year-olds is projected to decline, with modest growth resuming in 2048.

Among the institutional responses recommended in the report is a stronger focus on retention (emphasis mine).

The report also looks to adult students as an increasingly important population. That makes the retention figures particularly interesting. Part-time enrollment is not a proxy for age, but these gaps raise a practical question: how well are institutions supporting students whose studies have to fit around other commitments? At Southern Utah and Utah Tech, fewer than one-third of part-time students returned, with gaps of more than 36 percentage points compared with full-time students.

First-time undergraduates enrolled in fall 2023 who returned in fall 2024. Gaps are in percentage points.

The much smaller gap between full and part-time retention at Salt Lake Community College is echoed at technical colleges. Across Utah’s eight technical colleges, the unweighted average retention rate was 84.5% for full-time students and 67.3% for part-time students—a gap of 17.3 percentage points. Some full-time rates are eye-wateringly high: 95.7% at Southwest and 91.3% at Tooele.

The technical colleges’ stronger retention figures are worth investigating, although their programs and student populations differ from those at four-year institutions. The immediate question for universities is what is happening to their own part-time students—and what they could change to help more of them continue.

Signs of the times?

Often at this time of year I see press releases about individual institutions in the US touting their increases in enrollment and breaking of records. Sometimes I write about them over at Interesting Reads This Week.

This year, more of the announcements crossing my desk are also highlighting retention records.

For example, Iowa State University celebrated its fall 2026 enrollment by pointing out that it was supported by a record two-year retention rate.

Radford University similarly celebrated its climbing retention rate.

Southern Illinois University Carbondale saw a substantial increase in enrollment, also supported by big gains in retention.

This is an impression from the announcements crossing my desk, rather than a systematic count. But I’m interested in the shift in emphasis: institutions are celebrating keeping students alongside attracting them. As the pool of traditional-age students shrinks, I expect retention to feature more prominently in the enrollment story.

Belonging and staying aren’t the same measure

I am one of those people who thinks that belonging matters to student success and to keeping students enrolled. But two findings from the 2025 Australian Student Experience Survey complicate the picture.

The survey found that undergraduate students’ sense of belonging still had not recovered to prepandemic levels. By course, the Australians mean program. No surprise really from a nation that insists on calling a googly a wrong ’un (and I do love you all, even though the Ashes seem to have taken up permanent residence down under).

Yet the proportion of students who are considering leaving the institution is at its its lowest level in the survey’s history.

These are aggregate trends, and considering leaving is not the same as actually leaving. They don’t overturn the evidence on belonging. But they show that a weaker sense of belonging need not coincide with more students thinking about leaving. Institutions need to understand both experiences, rather than assume one measure tells the whole story.

In praise of small things

For those wondering, the Ashes is a trophy awarded for winning a series of cricket matches between Australia and England. The sight of the men’s trophy always makes my spouse giggle. The women have a newer and larger trophy.

The lab, the factory, and the dentist

I am a fan of Seth Godin (there, I said it). I find his writing full of interesting provocations. His recent division of workplaces into either a lab, a factory or a dentist is one of those. Quoting it almost in full.

I recognize all three approaches in EdTech and student success. And really we need all three: reliable processes, good judgment about individual cases, and genuine experimentation. My concern is how often we treat an intervention as a solved problem before we understand which students it helps, under what conditions and why. We could use more labs—and more willingness to change course when an experiment disappoints.

What are we actually testing?

An older study I came across recently offers a useful reminder about standardized tests. Researchers offered financial incentives for performance on a low-stakes test in a small group of US and Shanghai high schools. Scores improved substantially in the US sample; the researchers found no comparable improvement in Shanghai.

The finding raises a problem for international comparisons: scores can reflect differences in students’ willingness to make an effort, alongside differences in what they know. It doesn’t establish that American students generally need external incentives, or that culture alone explains the difference.

For those of us working in student success, it is a reminder to ask whether a measure captures what students can do, what they actually do, or their willingness to do it under particular conditions.

Musical coda

Almost ten years ago we went to the Doolin Folk Festival (well worth it if ever you are tempted). One of our discoveries was the Galway band My Fellow Sponges, whom my spouse adored. We managed to see them perform a couple more times before they disbanded.

Forward this to someone interested in student success. I’m hoping your intrinsic motivation will suffice; there’s no budget for financial incentives.

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