This Week in Student Success

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Two apparently unrelated things caught my attention this week, but they share an important feature: both concern the institutional machinery that shapes student success while remaining largely invisible to students. The first is the network of people and services required to bring a student and faculty member together in a classroom. The second is the collection of program choices, registration rules and defaults that influence what students study once they arrive.

Neither is normally described as teaching, but both shape students’ opportunities to learn and succeed.

99% Invisible ¹

A few years ago, I hired a plumber to repair something. When he handed me the bill, he also gave me a sheet explaining why his hourly rate was so high. I was paying not only for his time but also for part of the cost of his truck, tools, license, receptionist and the website through which I had found him.

The sheet made visible the infrastructure behind an apparently simple service. A classroom works much the same way.

I thought of that plumber after encountering yet another post attributing higher-education costs and declining confidence to the growth of administrators and professional staff. The underlying staffing trend deserves examination, although this particular comparison counted only full-time faculty and said little about what the expanding categories of employees actually do. References to lazy rivers supplied the usual rhetorical garnish.

Aggregate staffing figures can identify a question, but they cannot answer it. Before deciding that employees outside the classroom represent excess, we need to understand the work required to make the classroom possible.

To that end, I have mapped the institutional functions required to bring a student and faculty member together in a classroom. The diagram does not estimate the number of employees needed to perform those functions, and it deliberately excludes online learning, now a significant part of US higher education. It also omits some functions I consider important, including centers for teaching and learning.

Even this deliberately limited classroom version contains more than 20 distinct functions. They do not correspond to 20 employees for every faculty member: they may be combined, centralized, shared, outsourced or supported by technology. The exercise shows why a simple comparison between faculty and “everyone else” tells us remarkably little about whether an institution is appropriately staffed or operating efficiently.

Some of these functions may be inefficiently organized, and some institutions may employ more people than the work requires. The diagram is not a defense of every position or every increase in staffing. It is an argument for examining functions before declaring entire categories of employees unnecessary. The classroom is the visible encounter between faculty and students. The systems that admit the student, approve and schedule the course, appoint the instructor, maintain the space and support participation are less visible, but no less real. “Not teaching” is not the same as “not contributing to education.”

The quiet power of program defaults

A new report from the Community College Research Center begins with a troubling finding: although more community college students are earning credentials, more than one-third of those credentials do not lead to jobs paying a living wage or provide a viable pathway to a bachelor’s degree.

In 2023, CCRC partnered with the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program to create the Unlocking Opportunity network. Ten pilot colleges sought to increase enrollment and completion in high-value programs while reducing enrollment in programs associated with weak post-completion outcomes.

Aspen and CCRC define value primarily in economic terms, while also considering transfer and bachelor’s degree completion for programs intended to lead to four-year institutions.

The scale of the enrollment shift is striking, particularly among programs intended to lead directly to employment.

Producing these enrollment shifts required substantial work.

Each college approached the challenge somewhat differently. But across the ten pilot colleges the approaches featured the following actions.

Changing the choice architecture

• Flagging students without a declared major

• Removing General Studies as an easy default

• Strengthening career and program advising

Changing the program portfolio

• Redesigning programs with employers to make them higher value, for example, by adding drone technology to an agronomy program

• Expanding high-value programs

• Creating alternative pathways for students unable to enter capacity-constrained programs

Expanding the capacity to deliver

• Adding clinical placements

• Hiring placement coordinators and other necessary staff

• Reallocating resources toward programs the colleges wanted to grow

The changes to program portfolios and the architecture of student choice are particularly interesting—and underappreciated—as potential student-success interventions. How much apparent student choice is actually produced by application design, program labels, advising rules and institutional defaults?

Students still make choices, but institutions determine which choices appear first, which require additional effort and which are constrained by available capacity. “General Studies” can function as a neutral holding category, but it can also become a path of least resistance that postpones consequential decisions. Removing that default may prompt better planning; it may also steer students more assertively toward institutionally preferred programs. Whether that is beneficial depends on the quality of the advice, the suitability of the alternatives and the students’ own objectives.

These practices are promising and provide a welcome piece of positive news. But we should be precise about what they have achieved and what they represent in terms of student success.

Enrollment in a high-value program is an important intermediate result, but it is not yet a student-success outcome. The report demonstrates changes in program enrollment, not changes in completion, earnings or transfer success. Nor do we yet know the full cost of expanding high-value programs, many of which require specialized faculty, equipment or clinical placements. Finally, economic value is important, but it is not the only legitimate consideration in a student’s program choice.

Nevertheless, this is unusually encouraging work. The colleges did not merely tell students to make better choices. They changed the programs available, the defaults students encountered, the information informing their decisions and the capacity of high-value pathways.

That connects this report to the apparently unrelated question of university staffing. Student success is shaped by a great deal of work that occurs outside the immediate exchange between student and faculty member: designing programs, building systems, arranging placements, advising students and maintaining the infrastructure through which choices become possible. The useful question is not whether that work occurs inside or outside the classroom. It is whether the work is well designed, efficiently performed and demonstrably valuable to students.

Musical coda

My spouse and I have been assiduously working our way through lists of the top pop and rock songs for each year, beginning in 1965. I had forgotten how much I enjoy Creedence Clearwater Revival.

The default option should be to forward this post to someone who might find it interesting. Please don’t let it remain 99% invisible.

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1  To borrow the title of a favorite podcast 99%Invisible