This Week in Student Success

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I am writing most of this on March 1st, so Happy St David’s Day to you all, or Dydd Gŵyl Dewi hapus, as the Welsh might say.

But what happened this week in student success?

What if the biggest problem in student success isn’t financial aid, academic preparation, or advising capacity, but isolation?

This week I read two studies from very different contexts: HSIs in California and a large national online university. They have little in common structurally, but they point to the same uncomfortable conclusion: students are making consequential decisions alone.

They are not seeking help from the infrastructure we have spent a decade building. At the very moment when institutions have constructed the largest student success apparatus in higher education history — advising centers, early alerts, dashboards, one-stop shops, CRM nudges — students are quietly navigating without us.

That should stop us in our tracks.

The silent exit

A deceptively short research brief from the Community College Research Center (CCRC) surfaces a troubling pattern in how students leave college. Understanding the Needs of First-Generation College Students Who Stop Out examines a small sample of 55 students, with 10 in-depth interviews, drawn from a broader study of first-generation students at four public HSIs in California. The sample is modest but the implications are not.

The reasons students stopped out will not surprise anyone: financial strain, family responsibilities, uncertainty about academic pathways, feelings of isolation and disengagement, academic challenges in online courses.

But the more important finding is not why students stopped out. It is how. Students largely made the decision to stop out alone.

To the extent that students did discuss stopping out with anyone, it tended not to be with advisors or faculty. From the interviews, help-seeking was focused on immediate family members. No students consulted faculty.

This should trouble us deeply. We spend enormous energy building advising systems, dashboards, early-alert flags, and one-stop shops. Yet when students face one of the most consequential decisions of their academic careers, they are not consulting those structures. That is not merely a service delivery gap; it is a relational problem.

Students Blame Themselves

Something that is often overlooked, but that appears again and again in qualitative studies of student success, is how frequently students blame themselves for having failed. The researchers note:

No matter what student support structures we create, no matter how many early alerts, one-stop shops, or dashboards we build, if students frame the difficulties they face as personal failure rather than structural friction, they won’t raise their hands. That’s not a resource problem; it’s a narrative problem. If students interpret structural friction as personal deficiency, no amount of infrastructure will fix it.

If the CCRC study shows us what happens at the moment of stop-out, silence, self-blame, decisions made in isolation, the WGU study I am about to discuss helps explain the broader ecosystem that produces that silence. It is not just that students fail to seek help at the point of crisis. They are structurally disconnected long before crisis arrives.

Belonging isn’t enough

If the CCRC brief shows us how students leave, a new report from Western Governors University (WGU) Labs helps explain why. In Degrees Without Doors: Why Peer and Professional Networks Still Elude Online Learners, WGU surveyed 545 students about peer connections and professional networks. The results are sobering.

Nearly two-thirds (64%) reported making zero connections with fellow students outside coursework. More than 70% said they wanted more meaningful connections.

Students report belonging — 77% feel they belong at WGU — but only 28% feel connected to other students. Belonging is not the same as connection.

We talk endlessly about belonging in student success circles. We rarely measure connectedness.

The gaps extend beyond peers. Nearly one in five WGU students reported knowing no one working in their desired field. More than half reported knowing three or fewer.

For students from households earning under $45,000 annually, nearly a quarter reported knowing no one in their intended field compared to just 15.3% of their higher-income peers.

Social capital is unevenly distributed. Higher education is not compensating for that.

And unsurprisingly, when networks are weak, students default to self-reliance. Eighty-one percent of WGU students said they prefer to handle things on their own. Half feel uncomfortable asking for help. Nearly half feel they should already know the answer before reaching out.

Isolation reinforces silence, and silence reinforces isolation.

The hidden curriculum

WGU Labs describes this as a failure of the “hidden curriculum” — the informal, unwritten lessons students absorb outside formal coursework: how to network, seek mentorship, ask for help, and navigate professional norms. On traditional campuses, these skills are presumed to develop organically, through study groups, campus jobs, extracurricular activities, and casual interactions. Online learners lack those ambient opportunities.

I love this framing. But I also think we give traditional institutions too much credit. We assume students absorb this social operating system simply by proximity. My hunch is that, if we looked closely, we would find that many on-campus students are no better connected than their online peers. WGU simply had the backbone (I originally referenced a different body part in this sentence) to explore the issue and publish the results.

I would love to see similar studies of on-campus students and institutions. My suspicion is that the findings would not differ dramatically from WGU’s. If student success is about progression and completion, it is also about connection, to peers, to professionals, to mentors, and to systems that normalize struggle and make help-seeking ordinary rather than exceptional.

We are very good at building infrastructure but far less intentional about building networks.

Books outside of higher education

I read a great deal of higher education research. I also read a great deal outside it. More often than not, the most useful insights into student success come from books that are not about higher education at all.

A few from the past year that sharpened my thinking:

The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder by Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao

Sutton and Rao examine how unnecessary obstacles and inefficiencies slow organizations down. They describe some leaders as “friction fixers” or people who remove harmful friction and, at times, introduce constructive friction where it improves decision-making.

Student success is a minefield of normalized friction: opaque processes, unspoken expectations, stigma around help-seeking, confusing financial systems, invisible networking norms. We have mistaken adding resources for reducing friction. They are not the same thing.

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between
by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner

Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner analyze why large projects so often go over budget and underdeliver, and what distinguishes successful ones. Their prescription is deceptively simple: think slow and act fast, define scope clearly, break work into modular pieces, and plan with realistic odds.

Student success initiatives may not involve billion-dollar infrastructure, but they are enormously complex. Too often, student success reform is treated as a series of initiatives rather than as a disciplined execution challenge. We rarely conduct serious postmortems when efforts fall short. We underestimate complexity and overestimate implementation capacity. We would benefit from treating student success as rigorous project management rather than as a sequence of perpetual pilot programs — and from building in the kinds of postmortems Flyvbjerg and Gardner describe.

Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Pahlka.

This book is fascinating on many levels. Pahlka was part of a team brought in to fix the digital infrastructure problems that bedeviled early versions of the Obama health care initiative. She later played a similar role in repairing California’s unemployment claims system during the pandemic. Her account of fixing government digital systems is a masterclass in how technology-mediated, people-facing services go wrong, and how they can be made humane.

Her diagnosis applies directly to the digital infrastructure common in student success: advising platforms, student portals, and early-alert systems. The problem is rarely intent. It is misalignment among policy, technology, and lived experience. Our systems are optimized for compliance and reporting. Students experience them as obstacle courses.

Blackett’s War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare by Stephen Budiansky.

I read a great deal of history, especially about World War II. I read so much of it that my spouse accuses me of having run out of options and being reduced to reading histories of dentistry during the Nazi occupation of Luxembourg. That is not quite true.

But this book offers a highly particular take on the Second World War. It examines the role of natural scientists — physicists, chemists, and others — who were brought in to advance the war effort, for example by devising new ways of tracking submarines. These scientists struggled to persuade military and policy leaders to admit them into decision-making processes and to take their expertise seriously.

On the surface, this history of scientists collaborating with military leaders is far removed from higher education. But it illustrates something deeply relevant: progress requires combining expertise from radically different domains. In student success, we need faculty, advisors, technologists, institutional researchers, and administrators working in concert. Historically, those groups have operated independently. Integration creates friction. It also creates possibility.

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang.

I found this book compelling and fascinating, and I keep trying to get people to talk about it with me. One reader who knows China well did suggest that the arguments and examples may be a bit too neat. That is very likely the case — I am a China newbie (even though this guy helped teach me how to drive). But I was struck by Wang’s distinction between the United States as a nation of lawyers and China as a nation of engineers — and by how that distinction plays out in policy.

I certainly see this dynamic in AI policy in education in both the United States and China. But I have been wondering whether there is a similar — and China-unrelated — way to structure an analysis of student success (or EdTech) initiatives: less focus on policy and rules, and more about implementation and experimentation.

Where This Leaves Us

Two different studies, two very different institutional contexts, one common pattern: students navigating alone.

We have built advising centers, predictive analytics, CRM campaigns, early-alert systems, tutoring platforms, success coaches, and emergency aid programs. And yet, when students contemplate leaving, they do not call us. When they struggle, they blame themselves. When they need professional networks, they often have none.

This is not primarily a funding problem, a staffing problem, or even a data problem. It is a connection problem.

The infrastructure of student success has grown dramatically over the past decade. But infrastructure without connection is architecture without inhabitants. If students continue to experience higher education as something they must navigate alone, then we are not redesigning the student experience; we are decorating it.

Student success is not only about removing barriers. It is also about designing connection. And connection does not emerge accidentally. It must be built as intentionally as any advising platform or dashboard.

Musical Coda

In honor of St David’s Day, traditional Welsh lullaby Suo Gan. This version is also pretty awesome.

You may share this newsletter freely, though preference will be given to anyone named Jones, Evans, Thomas or some other similarly awesome Welsh name. I will also extend grace to those with Celtic roots, anyone who has admired a daffodil in earnest, anyone who voluntarily consumes leeks, anyone who cannot remember how many d’s are in Eisteddfod, and anyone who has ever risen from their seat during a Six Nations rugby match convinced they could improve the referee’s decision-making.

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