Student Support Needs Outpace College Capacity

The factors shaping whether students stay enrolled in college increasingly extend beyond the classroom, with financial pressures, mental health concerns and competing responsibilities complicating institutions’ efforts to keep students on track. At the same time, many colleges are struggling to find the resources and capacity they need to respond.

A new survey from EAB, conducted in June, explored the priorities and barriers guiding the practices and strategies of 459 student success leaders at two- and four-year institutions nationwide. It found that 59 percent of leaders said students’ social readiness had declined over the past year, while 54 percent reported a decline in academic readiness. Just 7 percent saw improvement in either area.

Tara Zirkel, director of strategic research at EAB and principal author of the report, said the findings show that trends that began during the pandemic have not yet substantially improved. The metrics include quantitative measures such as SAT and ACT scores and GPAs, as well as executive-function skills such as studying, problem-solving and staying engaged in class.

“There are all these signals that there’s this academic-readiness decline,” Zirkel said. “[Student success leaders] are hearing from faculty members, for example, who are saying, ‘A year ago I could assign students three books to read, and now I can barely get them to read one.’”

Student success leaders also reported declines on the social side, Zirkel said.

“The way we see that manifest on campus is students who can’t get along with their roommate or students who struggle with belonging or finding friends on campus or joining student organizations,” she said.

Capacity constraints: The survey shows that leaders recognize that keeping students enrolled requires addressing challenges beyond academics. Some 71 percent identified students’ financial challenges as having a negative impact on retention, 48 percent cited mental health and well-being concerns, 44 percent said academic preparedness, and 38 percent cited balancing school with work and family responsibilities as a deterrent to completion.

“We have students that look really good on paper—who have a 3.5 GPA and never missed class—and then they vanish and we don’t know where they went,” Zirkel said. “Often it’s because they’re having those mental health, financial [or] social challenges. So the way that we need to think about student success is that student success markers or indicators are bigger than things like GPA or course load.”

At the same time, institutions face their own hurdles. Some 60 percent of leaders cited budget constraints and 55 percent cited staffing shortages as barriers to meeting student success goals, limiting their ability to expand the services needed to support students.

“If we treat all students the same, we’re overserving some and underserving others,” she said. “One of the first things that institutions need to do is identify who are your highest-need students and who are your students who maybe can self-service a little bit more efficiently, or need less touches by an academic adviser over the course of the semester so you can reallocate some of that bandwidth into the student who does need a little bit more assistance.”

But money and staffing aren’t the only obstacles. Some 39 percent of leaders cited insufficient coordination across departments as a barrier to meeting student success goals, while 32 percent pointed to resistance to change and 28 percent to limited faculty engagement.

Those challenges are also reflected in the key capacity gaps leaders reported. One-quarter identified front-line staffing as their greatest capacity shortfall and 24 percent pointed to cross-campus coordination, compared with 11 percent who identified executive guidance and 7 percent manager capacity.

“A big piece of [advancing student success initiatives] is someone has to own it and say that it is a priority,” Zirkel said. “A lot of institutions say, ‘Oh, we want to do this,’ but there has to be a champion for it. Once you have a champion for it, and once you look at models of what other institutions are doing, it becomes a little easier.”

Institutions can also find success by starting with smaller pilot programs and gradually expanding their efforts, she added.

“We see successes when institutions actually phase out these types of initiatives into chunks that are more manageable,” Zirkel said. “It keeps staff engaged and it keeps the buy-in and the change management that needs to happen more manageable for people on campus.”

Scaling student support: Despite the constraints, leaders largely agree on which interventions have the greatest impact. About 44 percent of respondents identified proactive advising as one of the most effective strategies for keeping students on track, followed by early alerts for students with identified risks (43 percent) and academic support services such as tutoring and study-skills support (32 percent).

Scaling those approaches, however, can be difficult. The report found that adviser-to-student ratios at many institutions exceed 300 to one, depending on institution type and enrollment.

“We need to be able to string together all those other breadcrumbs that students leave us in a coordinated way,” Zirkel said. “Proactively understanding what the schema of their life is before they start the semester can be a really powerful way to connect students with basic needs resources, emergency financial aid and an academic adviser that can help them.”

Technology and AI could help institutions stretch limited staff capacity, but leaders remain wary of replacing the human connections they say are central to student success. Some 59 percent said AI can support routine or repetitive interactions but that staff interaction should remain the norm. Another 16 percent said staff interaction should remain the default in nearly all cases, while just 6 percent said AI could appropriately handle most interactions, reserving staff for students’ most complex needs.

“We are seeing institutions use technology to augment some of their staff workload,” Zirkel said. “Where AI tools lend a hand is something institutions are thinking more about … to offshore things that are repetitive to make room for things that are meaningful.”

Colleges are also facing growing pressure to demonstrate what students get from their degrees. Some 54 percent of student success leaders said expectations for demonstrating the return on investment of a college degree increased over the past year.

Yet many institutions lack visibility into the outcomes they are increasingly expected to demonstrate. The survey found that 40 percent do not track graduates’ earnings, while 23 percent do not track postgraduation employment or continuing-education outcomes, creating another gap between what institutions are asked to show and their capacity to do so.

“One thing that happens is that institutions just lack the data infrastructure to take on some of the data that would be required to really track graduation outcomes and track employment,” Zirkel said. “That employment data is so hard to get, depending on your state and where you are regionally.”

“It creates this bottleneck where they can’t push forward,” she added. “I don’t think it’s for a lack of trying. It’s just that it is an extremely difficult ball to push up the hill.”

Changing campus culture: Zirkel said the biggest barriers to advancing student success goals remain funding and staffing. But change management and campus culture are areas where higher education leaders may have more immediate control.

Among other things, they can build a campuswide culture around student success and recognize that the factors influencing student persistence increasingly extend beyond academics, she said.

“How do we make sure that we have a culture that’s centered in student success, graduation, retention—all these goals that we want to meet?” Zirkel asked. “Students need to know that their pathway and their credential is tied to this career outcome that they want, and there has to be an endpoint that they are working towards. Otherwise, why are they there?”

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