Tag: Experience

U-M Senior Learning Experience Designer

Are you searching for a learning designer, instructional designer or, as the University of Michigan calls the role, a learning experience designer? If so, your search is the perfect fit for Featured Gigs. Please reach out.

Today’s opportunity, senior learning experience designer, is with higher education’s premier academic innovation team, U-M’s Center for Academic Innovation. Evan Ogg Straub, CAI’s learning experience design lead, has the answers to my questions about the gig.

Q: What is the university’s mandate behind this role? How does it help align with and advance the university’s strategic priorities?

A: Imagine being the person who turns bold ideas into learning experiences that reach thousands of learners across the globe. The University of Michigan’s commitment to life-changing education, a key pillar of our Look to Michigan vision, drives this role’s focus on expanding access to high-quality, equitable learning experiences for a global audience.

The learning experience designer senior role advances the Center for Academic Innovation’s mission to collaborate across campus and around the world to create equitable, lifelong educational opportunities for learners everywhere. At CAI, we help translate Michigan’s academic excellence into scalable, learner-centered opportunities, both in our noncredit and for-credit portfolios. The learning experience designer senior role is at the forefront of our work.

Designers at CAI don’t just build courses; they co-create learning experiences that merge research-informed design and empathy with faculty expertise. We ensure every online or hybrid course reflects Michigan’s commitment to excellence while reimagining how learning reaches people across every stage of life, whether they are traditional students, working professionals or lifelong learners.

Q: Where does the role sit within the university structure? How will the person in this role engage with other units and leaders across campus?

A: Reporting to the learning experience design lead, the learning experience designer senior operates within a highly cross-functional team that brings together experts in design, technology, data and media. We have a highly collaborative environment, both within the center and with our faculty and academic partners.

As a learning experience designer senior, the ideal candidate will be collaborative and relationship-driven, working closely with faculty and academic unit leaders across the university’s schools and colleges to design meaningful online and hybrid learning experiences. We work in an environment that values experimentation, collaboration and continuous learning.

Q: What would success look like in one year? Three years? Beyond?

A: Our learning experience designers at CAI are connectors and translators. We turn teaching goals into actionable design strategies and align pedagogical vision with institutional priorities. In your first year, success looks like being a trusted connector who builds strong relationships across our team and with our academic partners. You’ll be shaping not only our courses but our culture, contributing your voice, curiosity and care to our thriving community.

In three years, this role may become a recognized mentor, leader and thought partner in learning experience design across U-M. A person in this role would be recognized for advancing best practices in digital pedagogy, mentoring colleagues and contributing to the university’s growing portfolio of online and hybrid programs.

Beyond that, success means lasting impact. The courses and programs you’ve helped build will keep reaching new learners, and the practices you’ve influenced will continue guiding our work long after any single project ends.

Q: What kinds of future roles would someone who took this position be prepared for?

A: This role offers the chance to develop strategic, creative and leadership skills that are highly transferable across higher education and beyond. Learning experience designers in this role gain experience with a diverse range of online and hybrid learning experiences, from degree programs, noncredit MOOCs and certificate-based stackable programs. This prepares our designers for roles that require both pedagogical expertise and operational agility.

People who grow in this role are well positioned to step into leadership positions, including leading design teams, shaping instructional design strategy within academic units or moving into broader academic innovation–focused roles within or outside of higher education.

Please get in touch if you are conducting a job search at the intersection of learning, technology and organizational change.

Source link

November 20, 2025
AI is unlocking insights from PTES to drive enhancement of the PGT experience faster than ever before

If, like me, you grew up watching Looney Tunes cartoons, you may remember Yosemite Sam’s popular phrase, “There’s gold in them thar hills.”

In surveys, as in gold mining, the greatest riches are often hidden and difficult to extract. This principle is perhaps especially true when institutions are seeking to enhance the postgraduate taught (PGT) student experience.

PGT students are far more than an extension of the undergraduate community; they represent a crucial, diverse and financially significant segment of the student body. Yet, despite their growing numbers and increasing strategic importance, PGT students, as Kelly Edmunds and Kate Strudwick have recently pointed out on Wonkhe, remain largely invisible in both published research and core institutional strategy.

Advance HE’s Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) is therefore one of the few critical insights we have about the PGT experience. But while the quantitative results offer a (usually fairly consistent) high-level view, the real intelligence required to drive meaningful enhancement inside higher education institutions is buried deep within the thousands of open-text comments collected. Faced with the sheer volume of data the choice is between eye-ball scanning and the inevitable introduction of human bias, or laborious and time-consuming manual coding. The challenge for the institutions participating in PTES this year isn’t the lack of data: it’s efficiently and reliably turning that dense, often contradictory, qualitative data into actionable, ethical, and equitable insights.

AI to the rescue

The application of machine learning AI technology to analysis of qualitative student survey data presents us with a generational opportunity to amplify the student voice. The critical question is not whether AI should be used, but how to ensure its use meets robust and ethical standards. For that you need the right process – and the right partner – to prioritise analytical substance, comprehensiveness, and sector-specific nuance.

UK HE training is non-negotiable. AI models must be deeply trained on a vast corpus of UK HE student comments. Without this sector-specific training, analysis will fail to accurately interpret the nuances of student language, sector jargon, and UK-specific feedback patterns.

Analysis must rely on a categorisation structure that has been developed and refined against multiple years of PTES data. This continuity ensures that the thematic framework reflects the nuances of the PGT experience.

To drive targeted enhancement, the model must break down feedback into highly granular sub-themes – moving far beyond simplistic buckets – ensuring staff can pinpoint the exact issue, whether it falls under learning resources, assessment feedback, or thesis supervision.

The analysis must be more than a static report. It must be delivered through integrated dashboard solutions that allow institutions to filter, drill down, and cross-reference the qualitative findings with demographic and discipline data. Only this level of flexibility enables staff to take equitable and targeted enhancement actions across their diverse PGT cohorts.

When these principles are prioritised, the result is an analytical framework specifically designed to meet the rigour and complexity required by the sector.

The partnership between Advance HE, evasys, and Student Voice AI, which analysed this year’s PTES data, demonstrates what is possible when these rigorous standards are prioritised. We have offered participating institutions a comprehensive service that analyses open comments alongside the detailed benchmarking reports that Advance HE already provides. This collaboration has successfully built an analytical framework that exemplifies how sector-trained AI can deliver high-confidence, actionable intelligence.

Jonathan Neves, Head of Research and Surveys, Advance HE calls our solution “customised, transparent and genuinely focused on improving the student experience, “ and adds, “We’re particularly impressed by how they present the data visually and look forward to seeing results from using these specialised tools in tandem.”

Substance uber alles

The commitment to analytical substance is paramount; without it, the risk to institutional resources and equity is severe. If institutions are to derive value, the analysis must be comprehensive. When the analysis lacks this depth institutional resources are wasted acting on partial or misleading evidence.

Rigorous analysis requires minimising what we call data leakage: the systematic failure to capture or categorise substantive feedback. Consider the alternative: when large percentages of feedback are ignored or left uncategorised, institutions are effectively muting a significant portion of the student voice. Or when a third of the remaining data is lumped into meaningless buckets like “other,” staff are left without actionable insight, forced to manually review thousands of comments to find the true issues.

This is the point where the qualitative data, intended to unlock enhancement, becomes unusable for quality assurance. The result is not just a flawed report, but the failure to deliver equitable enhancement for the cohorts whose voices were lost in the analytical noise.

Reliable, comprehensive processing is just the first step. The ultimate goal of AI analysis should be to deliver intelligence in a format that seamlessly integrates into strategic workflows. While impressive interfaces are visually appealing, genuine substance comes from the capacity to produce accurate, sector-relevant outputs. Institutions must be wary of solutions that offer a polished facade but deliver compromised analysis. Generic generative AI platforms, for example, offer the illusion of thematic analysis but are not robust.

But robust validation of any output is still required. This is the danger of smoke and mirrors – attractive dashboards that simply mask a high degree of data leakage, where large volumes of valuable feedback are ignored, miscategorised or rendered unusable by failing to assign sentiment.

Dig deep, act fast

When institutions choose rigour, the outcomes are fundamentally different, built on a foundation of confidence. Analysis ensures that virtually every substantive PGT comment is allocated to one or more UK-derived categories, providing a clear thematic structure for enhancement planning.

Every comment with substance is assigned both positive and negative sentiment, providing staff with the full, nuanced picture needed to build strategies that leverage strengths while addressing weaknesses.

This shift from raw data to actionable intelligence allows institutions to move quickly from insight to action. As Parama Chaudhury, Pro-Vice Provost (Education – Student Academic Experience) at UCL noted, the speed and quality of this approach “really helped us to get the qualitative results alongside the quantitative ones and encourage departmental colleagues to use the two in conjunction to start their work on quality enhancement.”

The capacity to produce accurate, sector-relevant outputs, driven by rigorous processing, is what truly unlocks strategic value. Converting complex data tables into readable narrative summaries for each theme allows academic and professional services leaders alike to immediately grasp the findings and move to action. The ability to access categorised data via flexible dashboards and in exportable formats ensures the analysis is useful for every level of institutional planning, from the department to the executive team. And providing sector benchmark reports allows institutions to understand their performance relative to peers, turning internal data into external intelligence.

The postgraduate taught experience is a critical pillar of UK higher education. The PTES data confirms the challenge, but the true opportunity lies in how institutions choose to interpret the wealth of student feedback they receive. The sheer volume of PGT feedback combined with the ethical imperative to deliver equitable enhancement for all students demands analytical rigour that is complete, nuanced, and sector-specific.

This means shifting the focus from simply collecting data to intelligently translating the student voice into strategic priorities. When institutions insist on this level of analytical integrity, they move past the risk of smoke and mirrors and gain the confidence to act fast and decisively.

It turns out Yosemite Sam was right all along: there’s gold in them thar hills. But finding it requires more than just a map; it requires the right analytical tools and rigour to finally extract that valuable resource and forge it into meaningful institutional change.

This article is published in association with evasys. evasys and Student Voice AI are offering no-cost advanced analysis of NSS open comments delivering comprehensive categorisation and sentiment analysis, secure dashboard to view results and a sector benchmark report. Click here to find out more and request your free analysis.

Source link

November 20, 2025
Higher education must include valuable workforce experience and training that helps students secure meaningful jobs

by Bruno V. Manno, The Hechinger Report
November 10, 2025

This fall, some 19 million undergraduates returned to U.S. campuses with a long-held expectation: Graduate, land an entry-level job, climb the career ladder. That formula is breaking down.

Once reliable gateway jobs for college graduates in industries like finance, consulting and journalism have tightened requirements. Many entry-level job postings that previously provided initial working experience for college graduates now require two to three years of prior experience, while AI, a recent analysis concluded, “snaps up good entry-level tasks,” especially routine work like drafting memos, preparing spreadsheets and summarizing research.

Without these proving grounds, new hires lose chances to build skills by doing. And the demand for work experience that potential workers don’t have creates an experience gap for new job seekers. Once stepping-stones, entry-level positions increasingly resemble mid-career jobs.

No doubt AI is and will continue to reshape work in general and entry-level jobs in particular in expected and unexpected ways. But we are not doomed to what some call an “AI job apocalypse” or a “white-collar bloodbath” that leads to mass unemployment. There are practical solutions to the experience gap problem when it comes to education and training programs. These include earn-and-learn models and other innovative public and private employer partnerships that build into their approaches opportunities for young people to gain valuable work experience.

Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

Before I describe these potential solutions, here is more information on how I see the problem.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that in March 2025, the unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 was 5.7 percent, compared to an overall unemployment rate of 4.0 percent. Other than the temporary pandemic-related spike in 2021, that was the highest unemployment rate for new grads since 2014. More recently, the Fed’s August 2025 unemployment rate for recent college graduates was 1 percentage point higher than its overall unemployment rate of 4.3 percent.

The experience gap phenomenon is not limited to the tech sector. In 2019, 61 percent of AI-related job postings were in the information technology and computer science sector, with 39 percent in non-tech sectors, labor analytics from Lightcast show. By 2024, the majority (51 percent versus 49 percent) of AI-related job postings were outside the tech sector.

The cumulative effect of all this is apparent. The hollowing out of entry-level work stalls mobility across the labor market, leaving many college graduates stranded before their careers can even begin. Moreover, these changes cut to the core of higher education’s promise.

If graduates can’t secure meaningful jobs, confidence in higher ed falters — one reason why it should come as no surprise that 56 percent of Americans think earning a four-year degree is not worth the cost, a March 2023 Wall Street Journal-NORC poll found, compared with 42 percent who think it is, a new low in a poll first administered in 2013. Skepticism was predominant among those ages 18 to 34, and college degree holders were among those most skeptical.

Related: As more question the value of a degree, colleges fight to prove their return on investment

The collapse of entry-level jobs isn’t just a cyclical downturn. It’s a structural shift. Left unchecked, this dynamic will deepen inequality, slow social mobility and further undermine faith in higher education.

As I’ve said, solutions exist. Here are five that I believe in:

Apprenticeships and other earn-and-learn models: Earn-and-learn apprenticeships are a promising, direct solution to the experience gap. They combine paid work with structured training and provide years of experience to college students in those jobs. Sectors from tech to health care are experimenting with this model, examples of which include registered apprenticeships, youth apprenticeships, pre-apprenticeships and apprenticeship degrees that allow individuals to pursue a degree while they work in an apprenticeship.

Skills-based hiring and alternative credentials: Initiatives such as skills-first hiring by major employers like IBM, Google and Apple aim to evaluate candidates based on their competencies rather than their degrees. Microcredentials, industry certificates and portfolios can serve as verifiable signals of skills gained through alternative training routes.

Stronger college and employer partnerships: Colleges can (and should) embed work-based learning into curricula through co-op programs, project-based courses and partnerships with local industries. Northeastern University and Drexel have long pioneered this model. And others, such as Western Governors University and Southern New Hampshire University, are using online learning to advance this approach. Scaling this solution could help close the experience gap.

Policy innovations: Governments can play a role by giving incentives to companies to create early career opportunities. Workforce Pell, recently enacted in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, expands financial aid to use for short-term training programs, opening new pathways for students who may not be pursuing traditional degrees. Tax credits for apprenticeship sponsors and funding for regional workforce hubs could further expand opportunities.

Reimagining internships: Expanding access to paid internships — especially for first-generation and low-income students — could democratize the attainment of experience. Philanthropies and local governments could underwrite stipends to ensure that opportunity isn’t reserved for the affluent who can afford unpaid internships or have social networks that connect them to these opportunities.

The challenge presented by this troubling experience gap is urgent. Today’s students deserve a college experience and a labor market in which education and effort still translate into opportunity.

Bruno V. Manno is a senior advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute, leading its What Works Lab, and is a former U.S. assistant secretary of education for policy.

Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

This story about workforce experience was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-too-many-college-graduates-are-stranded-before-their-careers-can-even-begin-we-cant-let-that-happen/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

<img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=113298&ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-too-many-college-graduates-are-stranded-before-their-careers-can-even-begin-we-cant-let-that-happen/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

Source link

November 10, 2025
Innovation Project Experience Designer at Grand Valley

Are you leading a search for a role at the intersection of learning, technology and organizational change? Today, we hear from Eric Kunnen, senior director of IT innovation and research at Grand Valley State University, who is recruiting for an innovation project experience designer.

Q: What is the university’s mandate behind this role? How does it help align with and advance the university’s strategic priorities?

A: Put simply, the IT innovation and research team’s futurEDlab is on a mission to unite faculty, staff and students to spark innovation and help shape the future of education. At Grand Valley State University, our Reach Higher Strategic Plan highlights the value of innovation as well as the university’s commitment to empowering learners and enriching society. Specifically, this role contributes to enhancing education through incubating ideas and facilitating project management in our work to design, develop and deliver innovative immersive experiences leveraging emerging technologies.

Q: Where does the role sit within the university structure? How will the person in this role engage with other units and leaders across campus?

A: The innovation project experience designer at GVSU will serve on the information technology division’s innovation and research team, engaging across the university through partnerships and interdisciplinary partnerships.

Q: What would success look like in one year? Three years? Beyond?

A: In year one, success includes catalyzing our project intake and management operational procedures within the futurEDlab, building momentum, capacity, efficiency and effectiveness as we deliver high-impact innovation experiences at Grand Valley State University. In three years, this role will be pivotal as we increase the value of digital transformation in teaching and learning as part of the innovation pipeline with the Blue Dot Lab ecosystem.

Q: What kinds of future roles would someone who took this position be prepared for?

A: Future roles for this position include coordination, management, leadership and innovation pathways in higher education, such as innovation strategy, digital transformation and senior level innovation program and project management.

Please get in touch if you are conducting a job search at the intersection of learning, technology and organizational change. Featuring your gig on Featured Gigs is free.

Source link

November 4, 2025
The Student Satisfaction Inventory: Data to Capture the Student Experience

Satisfaction data provides insights across the student experience.

The Student Satisfaction Inventory (SSI) is the original instrument in the family of Satisfaction-Priorities Survey instruments. With versions that are appropriate for four-year public/private institutions and two-year community colleges, the Student Satisfaction Inventory provides institutional insight and external national benchmarks to inform decision-making on more than 600 campuses across North America.

With its comprehensive approach, the Student Satisfaction Inventory gathers feedback from current students across all class levels to identify not only how satisfied they are, but also what is most important to them. Highly innovative when it first debuted in the mid-1990’s, the approach has now become the standard in understanding institutional strengths (areas of high importance and high satisfaction) and institutional challenges (areas of high importance and low satisfaction).

With these indicators, college leaders can celebrate what is working on their campus and target resources in areas that have the opportunity for improvement. By administering one survey, on an annual or every-other-year cycle, campuses can gather student feedback across the student experience, including instructional effectiveness, academic advising, registration, recruitment/financial aid, plus campus climate and support services, and track how satisfaction levels increase based on institutional efforts.

Along with tracking internal benchmarks, the Student Satisfaction Inventory results provide comparisons with a national external norm group of like-type institutions to identify where students are significantly more or less satisfied than students nationally (the national results are published annually). In addition, the provided institutional reporting offers the ability to slice the data by all of the standard and customizable demographic items to provide a clearer approach for targeted initiatives.

Like the Adult Student Priorities Survey and the Priorities Survey for Online Learners (the other survey instruments in the Satisfaction-Priorities Surveys family), the data gathered by the Student Satisfaction Inventory can support multiple initiatives on campus, including to inform student success efforts, to provide the student voice for strategic planning, to document priorities for accreditation purposes and to highlight positive messaging for recruitment activities. Student satisfaction has been positively linked with higher individual student retention and higher institutional graduation rates, getting right to the heart of higher education student success.

Sandra Hiebert, director of institutional assessment and academic compliance at McPherson College (KS) shares, “We have leveraged what we found in the SSI data to spark adaptive challenge conversations and to facilitate action decisions to directly address student concerns. The process has engaged key components of campus and is helping the student voice to be considered. The data and our subsequent actions were especially helpful for our accreditation process.”

See how you can strengthen student success with the Student Satisfaction Inventory

Learn more about best practices for administering the online Student Satisfaction Inventory at your institution, which can be done any time during the academic year on your institution’s timeline.

Source link

October 31, 2025
President’s Role in the Enrollment Experience

Why Enrollment Should Be a Shared Institutional Priority

The future hangs in the balance as enrollment management at your institution spirals into chaos.

Siloed growth initiatives are relegated solely to marketing departments, which bear the full weight of institutional pressure yet lack the authority to grow enrollment throughout the entire funnel. Overburdened marketing teams bombard campus stakeholders with complex, opaque data and demand astronomical digital marketing budgets that few truly understand. It’s just easier to say no.

Meanwhile, admissions teams and faculty pursue divergent, often conflicting strategies to recruit students, each operating in isolation with little coordination.

Student success teams, critical to retaining and supporting new enrollees, are entirely excluded from strategic discussions, leaving vital continuity efforts out of the equation.

As these disconnected forces collide, the institution risks a catastrophic decline in enrollment, eroding its mission and future viability — an unfolding crisis in which collaboration is abandoned and the system teeters on the brink of collapse.

This isn’t the latest thriller from your favorite streaming platform but instead a worst-case scenario of what some higher education institutions face today. The only one who can save them? You, the university president.

The President as Chief Enrollment Champion

It would be easy to assume that enrollment success and growth are mandates of marketing, admissions, and student support teams, as they focus on enrollment key performance indicators (KPIs), customer relationship management (CRM) systems, return on investment (ROI), lead-to-enrollment (L2E), and other such tools and metrics. For many university presidents and leaders, the details of enrollment management success are often isolated from broader priorities, such as mission, strategy, and resource allocation, even if enrollment growth is mentioned in the strategic plan.

Enrollment success is the lifeblood of institutional stability. The president and provost set the tone, vision, and degree of urgency around enrollment success initiatives. Without executive involvement, schools and departments compete instead of collaborating, pitting enrollment management teams against each other in a crowded market. This approach can lead to silos, missed opportunities, and uneven accountability. At worst, this approach leads to finger-pointing and a cycle of frustration and disappointment across the president’s cabinet.

While marketing and enrollment management teams are the frontline drivers of enrollment strategies, the ultimate success of growth and student satisfaction hinges on the strategic leadership of university presidents and provosts. Effective leadership necessitates active engagement and oversight to ensure that these efforts are successfully integrated into the university’s priority initiatives.

Strong executive involvement signals holistic institutional commitment. This helps break down barriers that can impede enrollment success and diminish the student enrollment experience, such as disconnects between the operational teams supporting enrollment management and the academic teams safeguarding quality, reputation, and ranking.

Here, we discuss why the university president must champion ambitious and responsible enrollment. We explore how executive leadership can ensure that enrollment efforts are appropriately resourced; aligned under a single vision; and integrated across governance, academics, operations, and administration to achieve the most compelling metrics: exceptional student experiences and outcomes.

Ensuring Adequate Resources and Support

One of the key ways presidents and provosts can bolster enrollment success is by ensuring that marketing, recruitment, and student success teams are sufficiently resourced. No one expects executive leadership to be in the weeds of enrollment management operations.

However, having a working understanding of digital marketing and how it differs from event-driven marketing (for example, enrollment fairs or conferences) can be helpful during budget allocation conversations for marketing campaigns.

Equally important is ensuring that faculty and enrollment management staff have access to training and development opportunities to stay current in a rapidly evolving field, which is full of new tools and approaches, as well as a diverse ecosystem of third-party support opportunities. Faculty and staff are on the front line of student engagement. Presidents and provosts can cultivate an environment of continuous professional development focused on inclusive teaching, technology integration, and student engagement strategies. Well-supported faculty and staff are more effective in creating positive learning environments that attract and retain students.

Finally, presidents and provosts should invest in a process for new academic program development that assesses whether programs meet market demand and provide graduates with specific professional outcomes.

When components such as the above are underfunded, efforts to increase enrollment and enhance the student experience are likely to falter over time.

Leveraging Modern Data and Analytics

Are enrollment management staff using outdated and siloed technology systems that require significant manual work to develop basic reporting and analysis? This is a critical area for institutional-level investment and support.

Data-driven decision-making is essential in today’s competitive enrollment environment. Presidents and provosts should champion investments in analytics platforms that provide insights into prospective students’ behaviors and indicate their likelihood of enrollment, academic performance, and postgraduation outcomes.

Using this data, enrollment management and academic leadership can tailor recruitment strategies, optimize academic pathways, and identify at-risk students early, enabling targeted interventions that improve retention and graduation rates.

Championing a Student-Centric Institutional Culture

At the heart of enrollment and student success is a culture that prioritizes the student journey, from initial inquiry through graduation and beyond. While the traditional student journey may be well understood, that of the adult and online learner may require special analysis and support.

Presidents and provosts must champion this student-first culture by fostering collaboration across academic units, student services, and administrative departments, ensuring that every touchpoint enhances the student experience for all types of learners.

Establish Intentional Governance for Enrollment Success With Shared Performance Metrics

Enrollment growth and student success are inherently cross-functional. Presidents and provosts can foster collaboration by establishing formal structures with the authority to act, such as integrated enrollment planning committees or task forces that bring together academic leadership, student affairs, admissions, marketing, and technology teams. This helps align cabinet-level leaders around a unified enrollment vision.

These cross-functional collaborations ensure that strategies are coordinated, data-driven, and responsive to emerging trends. For example, aligning ambitious enrollment growth plans with course section scheduling and staffing planning ensures responsible outcomes, rather than having faculty leaders scramble at the last minute to find instructors to cover overfull admitted-student course sections.

To ensure sustained focus, presidents and provosts should embed enrollment growth and student experience metrics into the university’s performance evaluations. This reinforces their importance across the institution and encourages all units to align their priorities accordingly. Shared accountability metrics should measure success from inquiry through graduation and be accessible to all teams through executive dashboards and regular reviews.

Promoting Innovation and Building External Partnerships

Staying competitive requires ongoing innovation and connection to the broader marketplace. Presidential and provost leadership should support the development of flexible academic pathways, such as online or hybrid programs, competency-based education, and microcredentials that appeal to diverse student populations.

Partnerships with industry, community organizations, and alumni can keep academic programs and curricula relevant, expand opportunities for students, and enhance the institution’s reputation. Presidents and provosts can lead efforts to establish these collaborations, opening pathways for internships, research projects, and employment while keeping a finger on the pulse of evolving industry and workforce skills needs and gaps.

Demonstrating Visible Leadership and Accountability

Finally, effective presidents and provosts demonstrate visible leadership by regularly communicating progress, celebrating successes, and holding units accountable for results. Transparent reporting on enrollment trends, student satisfaction, and graduation rates fosters a culture of continuous improvement. Training everyone to understand the basic KPIs that connect marketing, admissions, academics, and retention ensures that all are speaking the same language and working in partnership.

Key Takeaways

The strategic leadership of university presidents and provosts is essential for sustainable enrollment growth and a high-quality student enrollment experience. By actively championing student-centric culture, ensuring appropriate resourcing, fostering aligned governance and collaboration, leveraging data, and embedding metrics into institutional goals, executive leaders can create an environment where enrollment strategies are not only initiatives but also integral components of the university’s shared mission, leading to higher retention; better outcomes; and a stronger, more competitive institution.

Increase Leadership’s Role in Your Enrollment Experience

Archer Education partners with institutional leaders and admissions, marketing, and strategy teams to help them overcome enrollment challenges. Using tech-enabled, personalized enrollment marketing and management solutions, we can help your institution align its teams and create a strategic roadmap to sustainable growth.

Click here to request more information about Archer’s full-funnel engagement strategies and digital student experience technology.

Source link

October 20, 2025
Students on the UQ experience – Campus Review

University of Queensland pro-vice-chancellor of education and student experience Suzanna Le Mire hosted a student panel at the Queensland Commitment summit in October.

Please login below to view content or subscribe now.

Membership Login

Source link

October 12, 2025
Students score universities on experience – Campus Review

Three private universities offer the best student experience out of all Australian institutions according to the latest student experience survey, with the University of Divinity ranked number one overall.

Please login below to view content or subscribe now.

Membership Login

Source link

September 22, 2025
Unseen and under pressure: the academic experience of estranged and care-experienced students
The HEPI blog was kindly authored by Fiona Ellison, Co-Director, Unite Foundation

University is often described as a transformative experience, full of growth, challenge, and discovery. But for care-experienced and estranged students, the journey through higher education is often shaped by the absence of family support, financial insecurity, and a lack of belonging. The Unite Foundation has taken a deep dive into the latest findings from the HEPI and Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey 2025 (SAES), offering a clear picture of these students’ realities and developing a call to action.

The cost of insecurity

Care-experienced & estranged students are much more likely to drop out of university but we also know from the findings from the SAES that they’re much more likely to consider dropping out as well:
- 43% of care–experienced students and 44% of estranged students have considered withdrawing from university, compared to 28% of their peers.
Whilst the survey doesn’t give us insight into the reasons why, it does provide clues. For example, care-experienced students are experienced and estranged students work significantly more hours in paid employment:
- Care–experienced students work on average 11.3 hours/week, and estranged students work 11.1 hours/week, compared to 8.8 hours/week for other students.
This extra workload often stems from limited access to family financial support and a student finance system that doesn’t fully meet the needs of independent students. As HEPI highlighted in their work on minimum income standards those studying without financial support, even with the full maintenance loan, would still need to work over 20 hours at minimum wage to achieve the minimum income standard needed to survive at university.

We see this increased workload play out in students’ ability to attend lectures and complete academic work:
- 44% of care experienced students requested deadline extensions, compared to 29% of non-care experienced students.
It’s no wonder that only 79% of care-experienced students complete their undergraduate degrees compared to 89% of non-care-experienced students, and just 64% achieve a good honours degree compared to 77% of their non-care-experienced peers. We don’t have reliable data on estranged students – but that’s for another blog! If students are having to work longer hours just to afford to live, then it’s no wonder academic studies will often take a back seat.

However, there is a shining light. Housing is more than shelter – it’s a foundation for success. The Unite Foundation has, over the last 14 years, provided free, year-round accommodation to care-experienced and estranged students, removing a major barrier to continuity and wellbeing. Data published to celebrate our 10^th birthday found that there is ‘strong evidence that the scholarship improves educational outcomes of the students we support, specifically in year-to-year progression and completion’.

These figures highlight how housing insecurity and financial pressure can directly impact academic persistence and performance – but whilst there is a simple answer, not enough institutions are truly looking at the evidence-based solution to address the inequality this group of students face.

Loneliness and the need for community

One of the most striking findings within the report is the prevalence of loneliness:
- 45% of estranged students and 36% of care experienced students feel lonely “all or most of the time,” compared to 27% of other students.
Loneliness affects mental health, engagement, and retention. While it’s encouraging that loneliness among care-experienced students has decreased from 48% in 2023, the rise among estranged students signals a need for targeted support.

For this group of students, studying without the support network of family means the lack of ready-made networks needed when times are hard. The All of Us community was designed by and for care-experienced and estranged students to connect with peers – whether online or in real life. The handy guide #AllOfUsLocal is a practical toolkit that institutions can take to help create a community in your institution to create ways to support care experienced and estranged students to avoid isolation.

A mixed picture on wellbeing

Encouragingly, care-experienced students report similar levels of wellbeing to their non-care-experienced peers:
- Life satisfaction: 6.7 vs. 6.6
- Happiness yesterday: 6.2 for both groups
- Anxiety yesterday: 4.6 for both groups
However, estranged students consistently report lower scores:
- Happiness yesterday: 5.9
These differences underscore the emotional toll of estrangement and the importance of tailored support that ensures estranged students can access at any point – given we know for many students estrangement happens through their academic journey.

What next?

The Student Academic Experience Survey continues gives us the evidence about what this group of students thinks and feels about their time in higher education – it makes for some pretty tough reading. However, there isn’t anything new or surprising in the report for those of us that work in this space.

We now need to move beyond data and turn these insights into action. Universities, policymakers, and sector leaders must work together to ensure that care-experienced and estranged students are a target for activity. To do this, we need:
- Universities to prioritise year-round, affordable accommodation – Institutions should commit to providing or partnering on secure, year-round housing options for care-experienced and estranged students, recognising housing as a foundation for academic success.
- Targeted financial support and flexible funding models – Review and adapt bursary and hardship funding to reflect the true cost of living for independent students, especially those without family support.
- Better data collection and visibility – Universities and sector bodies must improve the identification and tracking of estranged students to ensure their needs are recognised and met.
- Embedding community-building initiatives – Adopt and promote tools like #AllOfUsLocal to reduce loneliness and foster belonging on campus. You can join our HE Peer Professionals network to share your challenges, celebrate successes and learn from others about how to support community-building activities.
At the Unite Foundation, we’ll shortly launch our new strategy, which will include practical steps that higher education institutions can take to ensure a focus on housing plays a key role in driving equality for care-experienced and estranged students. If you want to be the first to know about what we’re up to, do sign up to our newsletter.
Source link
September 19, 2025
Have we taken our eyes off the postgraduate student experience?

We know a lot about undergraduate student experience and how these students experience life at university, especially when it comes to considering a sense of belonging.

However, our understanding of the postgraduate student experience is arguably lacking compared to what we know about the experiences of their undergraduate counterparts.

Despite growing numbers and increasing strategic importance, postgraduate students remain largely invisible in both published research and institutional strategy.

As Katharine Hubbard recently pointed out on Wonkhe, despite the large and diverse postgraduate population within UK higher education institutions the equity of outcomes conversation rarely extends to consider postgraduates. Amid financial pressures, universities are increasingly market-driven, often prioritising initiatives that enhance the undergraduate experience. Yet, in 2023-24, UK institutions awarded more postgraduate qualifications than undergraduate ones, generating what was (in 2022-23) an estimated £1.7 billion in income. So why aren’t we paying more attention to how they experience university?

Working out the scenario

There is growing recognition that the postgraduate taught (PGT) student experience is qualitatively distinct from that of undergraduates. Postgraduate taught courses, often one-year-long Master’s degrees, attract students with varying motivations and expectations, who may also be facing challenges in pursuing their studies. For example, PGT students often face compressed timelines, intense academic demands and limited opportunities for social and academic integration due to the short duration of their courses. They often return to study after time in the workforce and may be juggling additional responsibilities such as paid work, caregiving or visa constraints alongside their studies.

A one-size-fits-all student support model applied to all taught students assumes some equivalence across the needs of undergraduate and postgraduate student cohorts, but we know that students are not homogenous. We need to approach the design and delivery of postgraduate courses without the assumptions that postgraduate students are inherently more autonomous or resilient as this can lead to a lack of tailored academic support, limited personal tutoring and underdeveloped community-building initiatives.

This neglect is particularly concerning given the strategic importance of PGT students to institutional and national agendas: the development of skilled employment sectors, and investment in the research pipeline (not to mention the role PGT fees play in supporting) institutional finances. Yet, as has been shown in recent Advance HE-led Postgraduate Taught Experience Surveys, without adequate support, many PGT students report feeling isolated, academically underprepared or unsupported in navigating career pathways post-graduation.

Reacting to wider trends

The past decade has seen a boom in research into the undergraduate student experience, but efforts to understand the experience of PGT students is evidently lagging behind. For every single peer-reviewed article published on how postgraduate students experience belonging, thirteen are published on undergraduates. As a sector, what should we do about this?

To address this imbalance, institutions need to recognise that postgraduate students are not undergraduate students; they have different expectations and therefore need to be responded to differently. Institutions need to stop trying to apply an undergraduate student experience lens to postgraduate student cohorts – let’s all look outside the lens.

And we need to stop making assumptions about our postgraduate students and ask better questions. Who are our postgraduate students? How many are alumni? How many commute? How is information like this being used to shape the welcome and induction offering that is given to these students? This is all central to fully understanding the challenge.

The hidden curriculum

There is also a need to think about how information about specific postgraduate cohorts is being disseminated to the staff involved in teaching and supporting these cohorts? Our own surveys of PGT students have identified multiple examples of international students who have spent weeks navigating unfamiliar academic cultures and trying to decipher the “hidden curriculum” of academia.

An example from one institution highlighted multiple international students believing that the institutional virtual learning environment “Blackboard” that they often heard being referred to, was an actual chalk-based blackboard that everyone else knew where it was located, except for them. That is not a failure of the students but of communication with them.

Higher education institutions need to ensure that students experiencing the compressed timescales that many PGT students face, being enrolled on a year-long course, are still able to access equitable opportunities for student support, personal and professional development and career services. Lengthy wait times, drawn-out applications or referral processes are unlikely to meet the needs of students enrolled on the intensive and relatively short courses which reflect many PGT programmes. Postgraduate students still need the wrap around support that undergraduate students need!

Postgraduate students are so much more than an extension of the undergraduate community. They are purposeful, motivated and diverse and form a vital component of the academic community. We need to ensure that we, as an academic community, are not taking our eyes off this crucial population of students who are essential both for the success of individual institutions and the wider sector as a whole.

Source link

September 2, 2025