For students, the result of this complexity has been added stress and missed deadlines. A 2025 national survey of 1,010 college students found 47 percent had missed a critical deadline, such as payment or assignment, because they couldn’t find the right information across multiple systems. Forty-one percent said navigating these systems affected their academic performance. In one preliminary focus group at Virginia State University (VSU), 10 out of 10 students told the nonprofit Ed Advancement that if a single platform had all the information they needed, they would use it on a daily basis.
Julian Capel, director of partner development for Ed Advancement, said students shared their familiarity with what he calls “the runaround.”
“You go to one office and they say, ‘Oh, no, you need to go to such and such,’ and when you get over there, they say, ‘No, you actually need to go to such and such,’” he said. “Any type of resistance or frustration can lead to a direct correlation of sense of belonging or feeling like this campus or institution doesn’t want me there.”
To tackle this problem, VSU worked with Ed Advancement last year in creating the Front Porch Portal, a free mobile-friendly tool that gives students key information about everything from financial aid status to course schedules, advising contacts, upcoming deadlines and even on-campus dining menus. The platform includes multiple tabs for different systems and notifies students when deadlines are approaching.
Capel said Front Porch Portal was developed with feedback at the forefront. Weekly sessions with IT teams, administrators and students helped shape what it would include. Top priorities included how much tuition was owed and when it was due, whether students had holds preventing registration, and contact information for students’ advisers.
Capel said student input prompted the creators to include information they otherwise would have omitted, such as a campus map and the hours of on-campus restaurants.
“They care about what they’re serving in the caf that day. That that might dictate whether they’re actually going to take that walk from their residence hall to the cafeteria,” he said. “Things that, because we’ve been so far removed from campus, we weren’t thinking about.”
The Front Porch Portal sits on top of existing infrastructure, pulling data from customer relationship management systems and deadline-tracking spreadsheets. Capel said Ed Advancement tailors the portal to each institution over the course of a few months, mapping out where necessary information currently resides, connecting those systems to the portal and refining through feedback sessions.
While the portal was co-designed with Virginia State University, it is generally targeted to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), according to Capel. Two HBCUs, Benedict College and South Carolina State University, have implemented the portal since its launch last year.
