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This Week in Student Success
Where narratives simplify and structures push back
Glenda Morgan
February 23, 2026
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This week we finally got much-needed snow here in Salt Lake City. The already stunning surroundings are even more so right now.
But what happened this week in student success?
The False Binary of Degree vs. No Degree
In a short article in Forbes, Jamie Merisotis powerfully lays out the false dichotomy between careers that require higher education and those that do not. These days we hear so much about how higher education is not worth it and that young people would be better off learning a trade. The benefits of trade-based careers are often overblown in these stories. As Merisotis argues, the distinction between the two career paths is far less stark than many would like to admit.
Merisotis describes the kind of framing to which we have become accustomed.
Every so often, a new story makes the rounds about how Americans without four-year college degrees can still make six-figure salaries. Take this piece from LendingTree, which highlights elevator installers and repairers—47.5 percent of whom earn more than $100,000 a year without a bachelor’s degree. It’s the kind of story that spreads quickly: hope for the non-college majority, proof that not all good jobs require a diploma.
The reality is that earning that level of income without a bachelor’s degree is the exception rather than the rule.
And while there are exceptions in certain trades, only 9 percent of workers without a bachelor’s degree earned $100,000 or more in 2023, according to the LendingTree analysis of Census Bureau data.
Put differently: If you’re betting on getting a six-figure salary without a bachelor’s degree, your odds are 1 in 10.
The odds of making six figures jump to about 1 in 3 for mid-career college graduates, and about half of those with advanced degrees earn $100,000 or more, according to College Board research.
Much of the discourse about jobs that do not require degrees glosses over the training required to do them, especially at a level that commands strong wages. Merisotis returns to the example of elevator repair and installation professionals introduced at the start of his article.
It typically requires a five-year apprenticeship, national certification, and in many states, a license. Apprentices train for thousands of hours—in classrooms and on the job—before they can work independently. Along the way, they climb into shafts, wire electrical systems, lift heavy equipment, and work in conditions that can be dangerous for the unprepared.
Much of this training is classroom-based, often at community and technical colleges. The discourse suggesting that higher education is no longer worth it disguises the fact that career preparation is not a binary choice between higher education and no higher education. Instead, as Merisotis argues, it exists on a continuum.
This is the real lesson. Higher education is not a binary choice—degree or no degree. It is a continuum of learning opportunities, from apprenticeships and certificates to associate degrees, bachelor’s degrees, and graduate study.
We should celebrate the fact that well-structured apprenticeships exist. In fact, we need more of them. They combine hands-on experience with classroom learning and often lead to strong wages and steady careers. But they also demand rigorous study, licensing exams, and continual updating of skills. That looks a lot like higher education—even if it doesn’t come packaged as a four-year degree.
This needs to become a core message from higher education. Everything involves learning — just in different forms. But it should not be merely an external message; we also need to internalize it and build that understanding into how we design programs and prepare students.
Higher education has a habit of collapsing complex continuums into tidy stories. The trades myth is one example. The current AI discourse is another. In both cases, the interesting questions lie beneath the headline.
Cyborgs, Centaurs, and Cognitive Offloading
Indulge me in a few minutes of unsolicited fangirling, but I love DEC survey reports. They ask interesting questions of impressive numbers of people and present the results in a compelling way. The most recent survey on AI adoption in higher education in Latin America is a case in point.
This is the largest regional AI-in-higher-ed survey to date in Latin America, with responses from 22,941 students and 7,319 faculty. Overall, attitudes toward AI are positive, and it is widely used.
92% of students are using AI
79% of faculty are using AI
94% of faculty expect to use AI in the future
Given this breadth of use and the generally positive attitudes (68% of students report feeling positive or very positive about AI), the nature of that use, and the concerns about that use that students express, are somewhat surprising. By far the most common student use of AI is for basic information seeking. More formal learning applications appear much lower on the list.
Given the prominence of information seeking, I was initially surprised that so many students reported concern about AI making learning more shallow — in other words, encouraging cognitive offloading. Fully 65% of students said they worry that AI will make learning too shallow and discourage critical thinking.
But as I looked back at the list of activities, those concerns began to make more sense. A great deal depends on how students are using AI. If they are relying on it to:
Generate ideas
Do much of the writing — despite the close relationship between writing and thinking
Summarize documents they do not read, wrestle with, and revisit a second or third time
then their use of AI is very likely making learning more shallow, and it shows a remarkable level of prescience on their part to be concerned. AI literacy in action!
The problem is that most frameworks for understanding AI literacy do not get down to that level. They tend to focus on risk assessment, ethics, and application. All of those are important, but I would argue they are not enough. DEC’s own AI literacy framework, which I think is a strong one, illustrates the point.
AI literacy is not just about risk, questioning, or evaluation; it is about how the student designs and manages the relationship between themselves and AI. The distinction between cyborgs and centaurs in the jagged frontier literature gestures toward this, though it does not fully capture it.
In centaur models, humans and AI split the work: the AI does certain tasks, the human does others. In cyborg models, human and AI thinking are intertwined in real time. The AI is embedded in the workflow so tightly that the boundary between the “human step” and the “AI step” begins to blur.
But just as it is not always straightforward which model produces better outputs, I do not think one model is inherently better for literacy than the other. It depends on how much cognitive work the human — in this case, the student — is still doing. If we care about student success, we cannot simply ask whether students are using AI. We have to ask how they are structuring the partnership, and how much of the intellectual labor they are retaining.
Field Guide to the Higher Ed Species
After spending a week reading about institutional collapse, cognitive offloading, and retention strain, I needed a palate cleanser. Inspired by this post, ChatGPT and I collaborated — cyborg-like — to come up with some collective nouns for the higher education, EdTech, and student success space.
The original post had some good ones, including.
A group of authors is an anxiety
A group of two or more men is a podcast
A group of toddlers is called a "migraine"
We came up with the following.
A pivot of EdTech startups
A demo of vendors
A deck of consultants
A hallucination of AI strategists
A firewall of CISOs
A rollout of change managers
A glitch of beta testers
A dashboard of student success leaders
An alert of advisors
A nudge of behavioral economists
A backlog of software developers
Jokes aside, and switching topics, there is nothing funny about burnout, yet it remains a perennial problem in student success.
Burnout Is a Structural Design Problem
Just as students struggle when expectations and effort fall out of alignment, so too do the staff tasked with supporting them. The EAB Office Hours podcast recently featured an episode examining the work of student success professionals and what institutions can do to support them more effectively.
One of the guests, Brooke Paradise, Associate Dean of Student Affairs for Inclusion and Engagement at Skidmore College, offered excellent insights into the factors that contribute to burnout among student success staff. As she makes clear, burnout is rarely about individual weakness. It is usually about structural design and operations.
So the biggest source of strain and primary driver of burnout, I think, is the mismatch between expectations and capacity. What do we have to do and what can we do and how much of that can we do? Emotional labor is another major touch point. Over time, the accumulation of crisis work, especially when paired with limited boundaries and a culture of always having to be available, this leads to sometimes compassion fatigue. I would also say burnout is fueled by the lack of clarity and sometimes recognition. Who doesn’t want to be recognized for good work? But what does that recognition in leadership look like? When hard work results in higher retentions but little visibility or feedback and career growth is given, it becomes really hard even for the most committed professionals to sustain that energy long-term.
She also had some great advice on the steps that senior college and university leaders could take to better support student success staff so as to maximize their impact and effectiveness.
So I think unintentionally institutional leaders most often undermine student success staff not through their lack of commitment, but through the misalignment between stated priorities and everyday decisions. And really what I mean by that is like, one common way this shows up is through under resourcing. So leaders may declare retention is mission critical, right? While maintaining high caseloads, short-term grant-funded positions or stagnant compensation. So stating that retention’s a priority, but not putting the fiscal oomph behind it to really keep them there. I think another one is initiative overload. What’s the hottest new thing that’s going on? A new tool, a new early alert system, strategic plans, piloting programs. All of these things are layered onto existing responsibilities without sunsetting some things. And so there’s just an overload of things to do that they view as this will make your job easier when in reality that’s not always the case. I think sometimes it comes to staff accountability too and how things sort of flow downward with corresponding authority. A lot of these decisions are being made from the people that are not in the trenches. And so what does that look like? Cultural signaling really matters. It’s when leaders exclude student success staff from these strategic conversations. And so they’re treating advising as this entry-level transactional work instead of really celebrating the retention it gains. And they’re doing this without acknowledging the labor behind it. And so that kind of over time erodes trust and motivation.
Building on these comments, and framing them slightly differently, here are some ways senior institutional leaders can better support student success staff — and, by extension, institutional success goals.
Align Resources with Rhetoric
If retention is mission critical, fund it like it is.
Keep caseloads manageable.
Reduce reliance on short-term, grant-funded roles for core work.
Ensure compensation reflects the complexity and impact of student success roles.
Stated priorities gain credibility when fiscal decisions reinforce them.
Prioritize Focus Over Initiative Overload
Protect staff capacity by being disciplined about change.
Sunset older initiatives when launching new ones.
Pilot strategically, not continuously.
Evaluate whether a new tool actually reduces workload before adding it.
Every new priority consumes bandwidth. Focus is a critical leadership decision.
If you expect outcomes, provide decision-making power.
Give student success leaders meaningful authority over the processes for which they are accountable.
Clarify decision rights.
Ensure operational voices shape policies that affect day-to-day work.
Responsibility without authority creates frustration. Responsibility with authority creates ownership.
Include Student Success Leaders in Strategic Conversations
Make advising and retention expertise visible at the highest levels.
Invite student success leaders into institutional planning discussions.
Seek input before decisions that affect frontline operations.
Treat advising as a strategic function, not merely a transactional service.
Inclusion signals value and improves decision quality.
Musical Coda
This video of a recording of Huw Montague Rendall & Elisabeth Boudreault singing Pa-Pa-Pa-Papagena from Mozart’s The Magic Flute is absolutely wonderful.
Forward this post to a dashboard of student success leaders, a pivot of edtech startups, or a full-blown hallucination of AI strategists. Or all three. All we ask is attribution.
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