This Week in Student Success

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It has been a minute since I last posted. What have I been reading, and what has happened in student success in the interim?

I've been on a translation kick recently, and a lot of my reading this week confirmed my thinking on the issue. It is not so much that we have a lack of information, but rather that there is a gap between what institutions think they are providing and what students perceive they are receiving.

Do students see the things that faculty believe that they are doing?

As much as it might portray me as a geek, I must confess to experiencing a frisson of excitement every time I see a new Tyton Partners survey report land in my inbox. Yes, they cover topics that are right in my wheelhouse. But what I really love is that they usually include student, faculty, and administrator perspectives on the same topic and have a knack for presenting the data in ways that highlight internal contradictions.

The latest Time for Class report is no exception. The report focuses heavily on AI and especially on the ways it has created challenges for faculty and forced some of them to rethink how they teach and, in particular, how they design and run assessments.

But for me, the most interesting thing in the report may have nothing to do with AI at all. Instead, I found myself fascinated by the disjuncture (Phil Hill argues that I am disproportionately attached to that word. I'm not. I just keep seeing them everywhere.) between what faculty say they are doing and what they are actually doing—or at least how those practices are being experienced by students.

Take this question about what practices faculty report using often or in every class. It sounds like someone swallowed the training schedule for the Center for Teaching Excellence.

I am sorry, but I am really not buying that 80-odd percent of faculty are using rubrics and active learning. Not at all, let alone often or in every class. Maybe 56% are using a dashboard if you count a quick glance at the LMS, but I'm not sure that really counts.

To me, this chart paints an overly sanguine picture of innovative teaching. Contrast it, for example, with the answer to this question about the major instructional challenges identified by faculty.

If most instructors are routinely setting clear expectations, using active learning, providing regular feedback, assigning authentic work, and designing courses around student engagement, why are cheating and attendance still the two biggest challenges?

That does not necessarily mean faculty are being dishonest. It may mean that faculty and students define these practices differently. It may mean that instructors are using them occasionally rather than consistently. Or it may mean that many of these practices are being implemented in ways that students do not experience as particularly meaningful. Whatever the explanation, the two charts sit uneasily beside one another.

But a little side comment attached to a later discussion of workforce readiness suggests what might be going on.

When asked whether they were incorporating real-world projects into their courses, between 58% and 73% of faculty said they were, depending on whether workforce readiness was a high priority for them. Yet only 26% of students reported completing a real-world project in a course.

That is not a small gap. Maybe faculty and students define "real-world project" differently. Maybe these projects are concentrated in a subset of courses. Maybe faculty are counting assignments that students do not perceive as particularly authentic or connected to the real world.

I don't know the answer. But when nearly two thirds of faculty say they are assigning real-world projects and only a quarter of students say they have completed one, it suggests that something is getting lost in translation.

Does this disjuncture extend to other teaching practices, such as active learning? If students do not recognize the things institutions believe they are providing, then measuring implementation may tell us very little about actual student experience.

We may have reached the point where most faculty know the language of good teaching: rubrics, active learning, authentic assessment, career relevance. The question is whether students are actually experiencing those things in meaningful ways.

I wish Tyton had explored this disjuncture in more detail because I suspect it lies at the heart of much of the engagement challenge in higher education and, by extension, student success itself.

Girls just want to get paid

A new report from the Strada Education Foundation digs into data from its 2025 State Opportunity Index to examine who gets paid for work-based learning. The results are disappointing.

Work-based learning—and student employment more broadly, including internships and apprenticeships—is becoming increasingly important in helping graduates secure meaningful employment. That point was reinforced for me by a recent report from ZipRecruiter that also landed in my inbox. Looking at recent graduates, ZipRecruiter found significant differences in employment outcomes based on prior work experience.

Which makes Strada's findings all the more troubling.

But a lot of internships and work-based learning is unpaid, severely limiting access for those for whom working on an unpaid basis is simply out of the question. Strada found a significant difference in the number of paid opportunities between four-year schools and two-year institutions. But within these broader categories, women, first-generation students, and students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups were far less likely to be paid for work-based learning opportunities.

The disproportionate impact at two year institutions is particularly concerning. We increasingly tell students that work-based learning is essential to career success while simultaneously making many of those opportunities financially inaccessible, especially for those who need it most. In other words, we have translated the importance of work-based learning but not yet translated access to it.

Birds

I found a newsletter listing of 100 of the greatest bird names. I found it useful as a potential source of new nicknames for annoying collaborators or colleagues.

Who amongst us, for example, has not had to deal with a Screaming Cowbird?

Not to mention an Oleaginous Hemispingus (I once worked with several of those).

There are many others (Bananaquit, Obscure Berrypecker, etc., etc.). But you, dear readers, you are the Charming Hummingbirds of my life.

In defense of progress

The latest U.S. Department of Education Condition of Education 2026 report contains some good news for those of us focused on student success. Given how much of the conversation centers on crisis and decline, it is worth occasionally remembering that many of the metrics we care about have actually improved over the past decade.

Some of the highlights for me include the following.

At two-year institutions, completion rates were higher across every student category for the 2016–17 entering cohort than for the 2009–10 entering cohort. First-time students, returning students, full-time students, and part-time students all saw gains.

Completion rates are also higher for the 2016-17 cohort than the 2009-10 cohort across all time frames in both 2-year and 4 year institutions.

Sometimes the translation problem works in the opposite direction. We have become so accustomed to narratives of decline that we overlook evidence of improvement. But we shouldn’t do that, instead we should celebrate this progress.

Distrustful, skeptical, still interested

Public Agenda has a subtly nuanced and useful report examining the experiences of young men and their engagement with civic institutions, including higher education. The authors map respondents along two dimensions—trait orientation and political alienation—and use those dimensions to create a set of personas that help explain how different groups of young men view institutions, opportunity, and their place in society.

In terms of higher education they describe a situation where the majority of men are distrusting of higher education or simply don’t see the ROI.

Young men especially question the extent to which higher education will prepare them for a career.

Despite this, a large percentage of young men without a degree indicate that they would like to obtain one.

And those who did complete a degree see it as paying off in multiple ways.

I find the contrast between the lack of trust and negative perceptions of ROI and yet the continued desire to get a degree fascinating. One of the things this suggests to me is that when it comes to men we have a translation problem in higher education. The challenge may not be convincing young men that education matters. It may be helping them translate higher education into the futures they want.

It looks like they are hosting a webinar on this report on July 9th.

Musical coda

Something to hold on to

f you found this issue useful, feel free to forward it to the Charming Hummingbirds in your own life.

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