It's a Design Problem

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The now annual Tyton Partners Driving Toward a Degree 2025 survey report has become a key resource for understanding student supports in higher education. This year’s report arrives at a moment when the sector is facing a convergence of unprecedented pressures: budget shortfalls exacerbated by federal funding changes and legal mandates, growing public skepticism about the value of higher education, and demographic shifts reducing the pool of traditional-age students. These external forces are compounded by heightened demands for accountability, which place even greater strain on institutions.

The report is packed with valuable data, and sheds light on some of the most pressing issues in student supports. The most critical issue identified in the report is a yawning gap between the kinds of supports institutions provide and the supports students actually want and use. Compounding this, many students distrust the supports available in their current format, seeing them as irrelevant, stigmatizing, or misaligned with their needs.

Yet even as the report identifies this issue through well-documented research, it falls into the very trap it describes. Rather than centering student needs, it reverts to focusing on the supports administrators already provide, the priorities they set, and the challenges they face in delivering them. In doing so, the report becomes a case study in how the student success conversation all too often centers the institution and its problems rather than the students themselves.

This is a missed opportunity. Institutions need to grapple with the more fundamental question of why students aren’t using support services and design solutions that feel relevant, accessible, and worthwhile to them. Without that, efforts to improve student success will continue to stall, at precisely the time when higher education can least afford it.

Student supports, awareness and use

At the heart of the report is a striking chart that captures the gap between the provision of supports, student awareness of those supports, and their actual usage of those services.

It is a busy chart that includes some things some of us would question as categories of student success, for example campus police/security. It also includes a wide range of student supports that differ from one another in a variety of ways, for example career advising is different than tutoring, and both are different than academic advising.

But there are really only two things you need to notice about this chart.

1. Academic advising, the first category on the far left, is the most commonly provided support (at 99% of institutions); 46% of students are aware of these services yet only 29% use them.

2. There is a persistent gap, across all supports, between what is provided, student awareness of the support, and actual student usage of the support.

Student identification of support needs

But the gaps don’t stop there - additional survey data make the yawning gap even more obvious. One of the most illuminating survey questions asked respondents which supports were most likely to influence a student’s decision to re-enroll the following term. That question gets to the heart of the issue: what students truly value. And here, the differences between administrators’ assumptions and students’ lived realities are profound.

For administrators, the top choice again is academic advising, at 72%, yet students place that in fifth place at 50%. At the same time, the second-most important support for students, academic registration at 52%, is the second-lowest priority for administrators.

Administrators are betting heavily on academic advising and financial aid counseling as the primary drivers of student retention and persistence while dismissing other services, such as student success coaching, as relatively unimportant. Students, however, take a more balanced view. They value a broader range of supports, placing particular emphasis on tutoring, registration support, career advising, mentoring, and success coaching - services administrators tend to undervalue.

It’s not surprising that administrators put so much weight on academic advising. Looking back at the earlier chart on provision versus awareness, advising stands out as the most frequently offered service (and the centerpiece of much of the report). Other forms of support are less commonly available, which helps explain administrators’ narrower focus.

There is clearly an awareness problem, but it runs deeper than that. The low levels of usage suggest that the services provided are not delivered in ways that make sense to students. While students consistently express interest in mentoring programs and success coaching, administrators remain focused on advising. Even when institutions do offer mentoring and coaching, students often don’t use them. There must be a reason for this disconnect.

The data on barriers to usage provide further evidence of this perception gap between administrators and students, as well as some serious concerns about how students view the support services currently available.

I don’t think this is an awareness problem; it’s a design problem. Administrators (and the report) frame the issue as one of awareness, but for students, relevance is by far the biggest concern. Inconvenient hours and access, along with the stigma associated with using support services, come in a close second and third as barriers, further evidence that the way services are designed and delivered is the real issue.

Disregard the above, its all about academic advising

Despite presenting impressive data showing that students have diverse needs requiring holistic support, and raising questions about the relevance of the services currently offered, the report keeps circling back to academic advising and the “perennial” challenges administrators face in delivering it in its current format. Chief among these recurring issues is the size of advising caseloads.

Even setting aside the Yogi Berra–like paradox that the two biggest problems with academic advising are that workloads are too high and students don’t use the services enough, this shift is striking. It illustrates the extent to which much of academia’s focus in student support centers on what administrators identify as important and the problems they are trying to solve, rather than on what might actually be happening for students.

The wrong solutions: yelling louder and easing workloads

While acknowledging that the nature of these services may be part of the problem, one of the three central recommendations in the report doubles down on awareness, essentially saying, “tell students louder and more often, and they’ll eventually come around.” [emphasis added]

The report does acknowledge, albeit mildly, that new models and changes may be necessary. However, the proposed solutions, such as group advising, seem driven more by the challenges identified by advisors (large caseloads) than by anything students themselves have flagged. For example, if students feel services are irrelevant or stigmatizing, delivering the same services in a group setting isn’t going to solve the problem. In fact, it’s likely to make it worse.

This lack of focus on the design problem is seen widely in higher education - this report is just an example. For instance, consider this study on inclusive advising at the University of Michigan and its self-referential recommendation .

The second thrust of the recommendations in the report is to emphasize technology, especially generative AI. The focus in this section is largely on how technology might ease pressures on advising workloads (once again emphasizing advising), with passing mention of applications in areas like mental health counseling and tutoring. Expanding availability by improving efficiency, essentially solving advisors’ problems, rather than examining why students don’t use these services. The report sidesteps the core issues behind low utilization: students often perceive services as irrelevant, stigmatized, or offered in formats that simply don’t fit their needs.

The problem is getting worse

Looking back at earlier editions of the Tyton survey, the gap between provision and student awareness of supports is hardly new. The 2023 survey already showed these disparities beginning to take shape.

Comparing the data to this year, things have gotten worse, not better. Clearly a different approach is needed.

Parting thoughts

I believe the key lies in truly listening to students and designing new approaches grounded in their insights. I understand this approach as participatory design, though it goes by other names as well. In a future post, I’ll share more about what I mean by this and highlight examples of how some institutions have successfully used the approach to redesign student services in ways that make more sense, and ultimately drive higher usage.

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