“Student success now equals belonging plus engagement plus outcomes,” Matthew Frank, a product marketing specialist from the software company Blackthorn, said at an Oct. 27 panel on reimagining the student experience at the 2025 EDUCAUSE conference in Nashville.
Panelists from universities, regional colleges and industry agreed that higher education is moving away from transactional, task-based models of service that required students to understand different offices and applications.
At an Oct. 28 session on a similar topic, entitled “Designing for the Student, Not the System,” attendees were asked how many different technologies students need to navigate from applying to completing their first semester. Answers ranged from two to 20, with some attendees saying simply, “too many.”
“Students aren't going to recognize this as a poorly designed system,” said Kasandrea Sereno, dean of retention and engagement at Tulsa Community College. “They’re going to internalize it and say, ‘Well, college just isn’t for me. I don't belong here.’”
Now, institutions and their technology leadership are attempting to make student experiences feel more connected, personalized and proactive. Instead of making students find the help they need, ideally schools should reach out through coordinated systems that anticipate needs, Sereno said.
CONNECTING THE SYSTEMS
Speaking about problems with the student experience, Chief Information Officer Jodie Penrod of Marshall University, West Virginia, said the challenge lies in connecting decades-old systems so students see the university as a single entity rather than a maze of disparate offices. According to Penrod, interoperability is the No. 1 gap in higher education right now, lagging behind other industries like health care.
Some institutions are tackling this by switching or augmenting their legacy systems to ones that allow more interoperability.
For example, Penrod said Marshall has used the same enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for more than 35 years. The school has started to use a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to take over some processes on the legacy ERP and better integrate data.
Similarly, Nick Nelson, director of enterprise applications at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, said the school saw improvement by changing its ERP platform to Workday, which “actually gets those silos talking to each other.”
Frank said a trend among higher-ed institutions is using student information systems (SIS) as systems of record, for storing information, and CRMs as one-stop hubs that leverage the SIS data.
Marylou O’Donnell-Rundlett, associate vice president of enrollment and student administration at Boston University (BU), said financial and recruitment pressures on institutions have put conversations about student experience more in the limelight, offering more opportunity to make necessary updates.
“It has driven conversations ... by imperative, as opposed to philosophy,” she said.
DESIGNING FOR TODAY’S STUDENTS
In order to make the right changes for student success, new mindsets as well as modern systems may be necessary. Penrod said universities often design systems based on what worked for them before, rather than what current students need.
“I feel like we’re projecting on students — like, we feel like they need to talk to people because that’s what would have solved our problems — instead of really figuring out what's going to solve their problems,” she said.
For example, leaders need to understand and not judge the fact that students tend to not want to talk on the phone as much as previous generations, O’Donnell-Rundlett said.
Artificial intelligence can offer alternative modalities of support, and initiatives like student hack-a-thons allow students to co-create solutions. For example, students at a BU hack-a-thon built four-year planners as well as tools to track campus shuttle buses and find research opportunities aligned with their career goals, O’Donnell-Rundlett said.
Frank suggested a hybrid approach with predictive analytics can also allow institutions to anticipate student needs and intervene proactively.
Looking ahead, it will be important to seek student input on technology updates and continually re-evaluate tools in place, Penrod said.
CIO Nathan Eatherton of Columbia College suggested using existing student groups for input, citing his relationship with the student council as an example.
“We just have to be really intentional on defining what success looks like around the student experience,” he said. “And then from there, just have a lot of meaningful conversations on where we want to prioritize our time and resources.”
