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This Week in Student Success
Basic needs, belonging, and bureaucracy
Glenda Morgan
October 12, 2025
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This Week in Student Success is arriving a bit late because I was driving back from Boise, Idaho. Fear not, I had plenty of sustenance for the road. And because I was in Idaho, potatoes were mandatory, specifically, a maple-bacon potato doughnut. It was delicious.
But what happened this week in student success?
Trouble in paradise
A detailed survey from the University of Hawai‘i highlights the non-academic challenges many college students face. Two faculty members surveyed 2,700 students across the ten campuses of the University of Hawai‘i System on issues including access to food, housing, transportation, and technology.
We’ve heard a lot in recent years about food insecurity on campuses, so it’s unsurprising that the survey found widespread need. The authors define food insecurity as lacking reliable access to sufficient, nutritious food.
the uncertain, limited, or no access to enough food to satisfy students' needs for a healthy and active lifestyle.
They further break food insecurity into levels, from concern that food will run out (least severe) to actual hunger (most severe). Nearly 40% of University of Hawai‘i students experience the most severe form. Rates vary widely across the system, from 27.5% at Kaua‘i Community College to 46% at Windward Community College.
The survey found that almost 20% of students were housing insecure, defined as lacking a consistent, adequate, and safe place to stay and sleep, with 7% experiencing severe housing insecurity, meaning they lacked stable shelter or faced episodes of homelessness.
Students also suffer from a degree of transport insecurity, with.
1 out of 5 (20%) UH students sometimes or often experience not having enough money for gas and/or car repairs, and 1 out of 10 (10%) sometimes or often have no money for buying a bus or train ticket.
In addition, 14% of students lack reliable internet access.
These insecurities are, unfortunately, all too familiar, and their prevalence is sobering. One finding I found especially surprising and worrisome for student success: 23.5% of students reported not having a safe place to study.
Food, housing, transportation, and technology insecurity all significantly undermine student success. And lacking a safe place to study is perhaps the most disheartening blow, a final barrier that makes persistence and achievement even harder for already vulnerable students.
Getting by with a little help from their friends
Mark Granovetter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties” is one of the most cited papers in the social sciences. He argues that social networks, especially among acquaintances, are crucial for finding work. I’d go further: friendships of all kinds help students succeed in college. Knowing people on campus means having someone to ask for notes from a missed class, to explain a concept (when they’re not quite ready for office hours), and so on. This view is supported by the work of scholars like Richard Light and others.
So even if you don’t care whether students have a vibrant social life or make friends, you should care because the absence of both likely harms student success. And based on a recent EAB survey of 1,500 first-year students, we have reason to worry.
Many students felt let down by their social experience in their first year. Forty percent said not making friends was one of their biggest disappointments, 42% were unhappy with their social life, and 35% said they didn’t feel like they belonged. But when students did form strong connections, it made a big difference. One-third said making new friends was one of the most satisfying parts of their first year—ranking even higher than meeting with faculty or advisors. Other highly ranked responses included not feeling too stressed out and finding their coursework manageable
When I taught, I’d always ask students whether they knew at least one classmate well enough to ask for notes. Fewer than 5% ever did. It’s not a new problem, but it’s one more item on the growing list of issues that deserve our attention.
Perhaps
Lately I have been thinking about this quote.
Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit
Roughly translated this means “Perhaps someday it will be pleasing to remember even these things” and is taken generally to mean that some day we will look back, having weathered the storm and be able to have a feeling of accomplishment. I hope so, I also hope that we build higher education systems and especially student success structures that are stronger and better for students.
Hand waving instead of substance
The New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE), which accredits many well-known institutions, is circulating a draft of new accreditation standards (to take effect in 2026). The good news: they’re substantially shorter than the current 2021 standards. The bad news: they lean on generalities and rhetorical hand-waving instead of specifying concrete mechanisms institutions should use to ensure student success.
Take student support and learning resources. The 2021 standards name the resources students should be able to access and the kinds of staff required to provide them. These include, for example.
6.19 The institution’s system of academic advising meets student needs for information and advice compatible with its educational objectives. The quality of advising is assured regardless of the location of instruction or the mode of delivery.
[snip]
6.2 There are an adequate number of faculty and academic staff, including librarians, advisors, and instructional designers, whose time commitment to the institution is sufficient to assure the accomplishment of class and out-of-class responsibilities essential for the fulfillment of institutional mission and purposes. [snip]
7.21 The institution has sufficient and appropriate information, physical, and technological resources necessary for the achievement of its purposes wherever and however its academic programs are offered. It devotes sufficient resources to maintain and enhance its information, physical, and technological resources. [snip]
7.22 The institution provides access to library and information resources, services, facilities, and qualified staff sufficient to support its teaching and learning environments and its research and public service mission as appropriate.
[snip]
8.6 The institution defines measures of student success and levels of achievement appropriate to its mission, modalities and locations of instruction, and student body, including any specifically recruited populations. These measures include rates of progression, retention, transfer, and graduation; default and loan repayment rates; licensure passage rates; and employment. The institution ensures that information about student success is easily accessible on its website.
These are replaced in the new draft standards with the following statements.
2.21 The institution systematically and regularly identifies the needs of its student population and provides support services and makes provisions for responding to them including strategies for having all students feel welcomed, supported, included in the community.
2.22 The institution provides advising, academic support, and other student support services appropriate to the student body.
[snip]
3.9 Institutions must ensure their physical, information, and technological resources are sufficient to support student learning.
In terms of academic quality, the two sets of standards also differ in how they define and ensure it. The current 2021 standards approach academic quality through a balance of inputs, processes, and outcomes, for example, by specifying requirements for program design, faculty qualifications, curriculum review processes, and mechanisms for assessing learning outcomes.
4.19 [snip] mastery of the knowledge, information resources, methods, and theories pertinent to a particular area of inquiry.
4.36 The institution demonstrates its clear and ongoing authority and administrative oversight for the academic elements of all courses for which it awards institutional credit or credentials. These responsibilities include course content, the specification of required competencies, and the delivery of the instructional program; selection, approval, professional development, and evaluation of faculty; admission, registration, and retention of students; evaluation of prior learning; and evaluation of student progress, including the awarding and recording of credit.
4.46 [snip] Students have ready access to and support in using appropriate learning resources.
In the draft 2026 standards, by contrast, the emphasis shifts toward institutional accountability and holistic evaluation rather than discrete academic practices. Institutions are required to “demonstrate educational effectiveness and the success of all students,” but the draft omits detailed expectations for how learning quality is measured or supported. Programs must be backed by “sufficient resources,” without any definition of what “sufficient” entails. Faculty roles remain central, yet there is no explicit mention of partnerships (e.g., libraries, learning centers) or of evidence-based assessment cycles.
Other ways the new standards gloss over student success are summarized in the table below.
Dimension | 2021 Standards | Draft 2026 Standards | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
Student Success | Defined through institutional systems teaching, resources, assessment etc. | Defined through outcomes; reduced detail on mechanisms | From structural to outcome-based |
Student Support | Explicit inclusion of instructional design, libraries, & advising | Generic “information resources” and minimal staffing expectations | Deprofessionalization and abstraction |
Academic Quality | Grounded in curriculum design, evidence, and faculty-resource collaboration | Focused on institutional effectiveness; fewer operational details | Reduced emphasis on teaching quality mechanisms |
Assessment and Improvement | Requires measurable evidence of learning and continuous improvement | Simplified into institutional evaluation processes | Narrowed assessment scope |
Ultimately, universities should be free to fulfill their missions without being micromanaged by accreditors (or governments, for that matter). But accreditation also carries a responsibility: to define clear, credible standards of quality and process that institutions must meet. Somewhere between the overreach exemplified by Middle States’ new OPM contract requirements and the vague gestures of the draft NECHE standards lies a sensible middle ground. Many New England institutions will uphold student success through thoughtful design, investment, and staffing. Others, however, may interpret nebulous phrases like “sufficient resources” in ways that permit much lower levels of student achievement. By shifting emphasis toward broad notions of “effectiveness” and outcomes, the new standards risk merely duplicating the accountability metrics already imposed by state and federal regulators. Accreditation should instead safeguard the quality of educational processes and experiences, the human, intellectual, and structural conditions that make genuine student success possible.
In the interest of full disclosure: I’m married to a librarian. The retreat from libraries drew me to the document; the retreat from student success kept me reading, and motivated me to write about it.
Musical Coda
While in Boise we saw I’m With Her (Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan) live in concert. It was wonderful.
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