This Week in Student Success

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So I may have spent most of yesterday trying to construct a student success version of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament after being annoyed by an alternative bracket someone shared on LinkedIn (ok, if you insist, it was this one). I’m not going to share my version with you because I ultimately learned that coming up with good measures is really hard—something you would think I would know by now.

The things we count (and the things we don’t)

I love Sketchplanations, but this week I really love Sketchplanations. Jono Hey has a wonderful graphic on the McNamara Fallacy.

He goes on to cover some related measurement challenges, such as Goodhart’s Law (which I thought about on an hourly basis during my last couple of years at Gartner), Campbell’s Law, and the Cobra Effect.

We wouldn’t know anything about that in student success, now would we? No, never.

And as it turns out, this week offered several reminders of what happens when we measure what’s easy rather than what matters. One place this shows up very clearly is in how we define completion.

The students who almost finished—and why that matters

One of the things I tried to use to construct my scores for the alternative bracket was completion. Oddly enough, one of the things I read this week was a fascinating report from About Texas 2036 on the need to grant recognition to students for credits they have already earned.

The central thrust of the report is that by 2031, 61% of jobs in Texas will require some form of post-secondary education, but the state is falling well short of that number. Yet a hidden opportunity exists: between 2012 and 2022, more than 54,000 Texans earned 60+ credit hours but left higher education without a credential. The report dubs these students “Potential Completers.”

But I found two things about the report striking. The first is the scale at which we are losing students from the post-secondary system—and how late we are losing them. Almost half (47%) of those who entered the post-secondary system in Texas completed either a bachelor’s degree, an associate degree, or a certificate, which is less than ideal but not as bad as I might have predicted. But tens of thousands left after earning 60+ credits—i.e., really close to completion. As the report argues:

This does beg the question of why these students are falling through the cracks—and whether the factors causing them to stop out are different from those affecting the almost half of students who leave earlier.

The second thing that struck me in the report was the shift in how we talk about these students. Instead of framing them as students who didn’t finish, or even as failures, there is a move toward thinking of them as near-completers whose progress has gone unrecognized.

That is a subtle but powerful move, and one I hope we see more of. It’s also a reminder that sometimes the problem isn’t that students aren’t succeeding. It’s that we’re not very good at recognizing the ways they already have. But measurement isn’t just about credentials. It’s also about how we understand students’ day-to-day lives.

This is not what “affording college” looks like

Trellis Strategies just released their Student Financial Wellness Survey report, and it makes for some interesting—and at times uncomfortable—reading. On one level, the report can be read as a description of the financial hardships students face. But it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t about students being stretched. It’s about structural instability and students living on the edge.

• 54% can’t access $500

• 65% ran out of money

• 54% face basic needs insecurity

This is not exactly the financial cushion most of us would hope for.

On one level, this reads like financial stress. But it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t about students being stretched. It’s about structural instability.

Financial instability is the baseline environment in which college happens, and it affects a majority of students in both sectors. And it’s clear that this financial stress is directly interfering with learning. Financial and financially related disruptions are widespread among students responding to this survey, with around a fifth reporting that they have had to miss class because of a problem.

Of the students experiencing financial difficulties, nearly half said their financial stress made it hard to concentrate on their coursework. This isn’t just about whether students can enroll. It’s about whether they can actually learn once they get there. None of these are unsolvable problems. But they do require us to design around students’ actual lives rather than the ones we imagine they have.

What’s also striking is that students are financing college with consumer financial tools, including credit cards, buy-now-pay-later services, and payday loans.

Which, when you think about it, makes a certain kind of sense. If your financial aid doesn’t cover your rent or your groceries, you don’t have a lot of options. As coping strategies go, it’s a pretty rational one.

What is also clear is that the mental health challenges we keep talking about are not separate from these issues, but are embedded in the financial and structural challenges students face.

Using validated scales to measure student well-being, the survey found that:

Increasingly, we see a chain of conditions: financial stress → time pressure → isolation → mental health → academic disruption. And it is a chain, not a set of separate issues.

But the most surprising thing in the report is that, despite all of this, students remain remarkably optimistic about higher education. A large majority still believe it is a good investment. Even more believe it will lead to a better quality of life. That matters. It means the core value proposition hasn’t collapsed. We haven’t lost them.

But it also raises a harder question: students’ continuing belief in higher education, alongside their debt anxiety, instability, missed classes, and depression, shows how decoupled their beliefs have become from their actual experience of college.

The report doesn’t offer easy solutions. But it does point in a direction. Financial wellbeing needs to be a bigger part of student success, and if we are serious about lowering the cost of college, we also need to pay attention to the ancillary costs that shape students’ day-to-day lives. It also suggests that improving student success may require spending a little less time refining our measures and a little more time paying attention to how students are actually living.

We spend a lot of time trying to measure and manage student success. But weeks like this are a useful reminder that students are navigating systems that don’t always line up with their lives. And when that happens, they adapt.

What happens when systems don’t fit

I’m going to leave you as I started, talking about the NCAA college basketball championships. There is a growing issue with the transfer portal in U.S. college sports, and no, I don’t think an executive order forcing students to stay put is either serious or likely to succeed.

But I am struck by the impact of the urge to transfer to a new program at the end of a season on college athletes. For example, just two days after the end of the season, 557 women’s Division I basketball players had entered the transfer portal, and most will be playing for new teams next year. That number will only increase over the next few days.

For a not inconsiderable number of players, this is not the first time they have entered the portal, as this example shows.

The vast majority of these players will never play professionally. What havoc is all this movement having on their careers and intellectual development, especially given how hard we make transfer when they do try to settle somewhere? It does make you wonder what this level of churn is doing to students’ academic lives.

And I will get off my soapbox by sharing the buzzer-beater that ended LSU’s season.

Musical coda

And thinking about measurement—and the growing distance between B1G campuses—here’s a very old rendition of Peter, Paul and Mary’s “500 Miles.”

If you found this useful, consider forwarding it to your teammates. If not, I will assume I am measuring the wrong thing.

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