I worked in student support for over a decade at a mid-sized (18,000 FTE) public university.  During that time I discovered how challenging supporting students can be.  Regardless of where you work, if you are a student success professional you likely support a very diverse group of students with different lived experiences and different needs.  What makes this an even more difficult is that in light of shrinking budgets and the great exodus of staff and administrators away from higher education, many success centers find themselves having to do considerably more with less.    Fortunately, over the past decade or so we have seen the development and growth of technology tools that should help us to reach more students in more effective ways.  Unfortunately, not all campuses have done a great job of adopting these solutions and rolling them out in ways that truly support students.

On our campus, we adopted an early alert system and after several years we had roughly 30% of faculty utilizing the system to identify students who might need extra help.  This tool really helped us identify and reach out to students who were struggling.  Many students reported that they were grateful to be connected with areas on campus that could help them with their coursework or other challenges they were experiencing.  However, we did not take into account how our messaging would be received by all students and we quickly discovered that a significant portion of the students we were trying to help felt threatened and intimidated by our outreach.  I can’t tell you the number of students who, when they came in to see me or someone on my team, accused us of thinking they weren’t smart enough to be in college.  It was at this point that we realized that a system we had adopted to help support our most vulnerable students might in fact be causing them to withdraw and shy away from the very support we were offering.  How had we not considered this?  Research has shown us that many first-generation and academically underprepared students already have feelings that they are imposters and that they don’t belong in college.  By sending early alert messages to students letting them know that their instructor had indicated that they were struggling and that support was available, we were reinforcing those limiting beliefs that our students already held and left many of them feeling embarrassed and afraid to reach out.

So – how do we support all of our very diverse students without causing many of them to withdraw and retreat from the very help that is supposed to support their success?  First of all we need to recognize that not all messaging in created equal.  Messages and language that might be fine for some students might be off putting for others.  There are lots of tools in the market that can help schools to segment their students by different variables like major, credits completed, first-generation, Pell eligible, adult learner, etc.  Your team could decide how to segment your student population (create market segments) based on your campus population.  When crafting messages, consider how the message might need to change by market segment – this is something marketing professionals have done for years.  They are experts in crafting different messages to resonate with different populations.  The goal of most messaging is to prompt action. To do this, you may need similar but different messaging for different groups of students.

Another way we can get information to the right students at the right time is to craft content around the student lifecycle for each of your identified market segments.  If your school uses a CRM, you could do things like send out a 1 item survey the week before classes begin asking students to identify how they plan to pay for the semester (student loans, working, bill is already paid, I have no idea, etc.). Based on how students respond, your team can craft follow up informational content to be sent to the different segments of students -i.e. “here’s how you accept your financial aid tutorial” for all of the students who indicated they would be using student loans to pay for the term.  Maybe instead of a CRM your school has a mobile app with a social feed where you can deliver content through different channels targeted at different student populations.  The key is to deliver targeted content based on the student lifecycle and the needs of the particular population – allowing students to choose which content to engage with and how they want to engage with it.  This strategy encourages student initiated engagement that is non-threatening and can actually help your students develop their help seeking skills – something all students will need at some point during their college journey.

If we want to truly support students, we need to set up systems of support and communication that share information with students in a non-threatening way.   Let’s provide students with the opportunity to engage with the information that resonates with them and initiate contact with support services if they choose to do so.  We have to find the sweet spot between supporting students by being intrusive and giving them the space to figure out what they need and how they want to receive help.   When we do this the right way, we have a better chance at reaching all students with the right messages at the right time which should lead to fewer students slipping through the cracks and dropping out of school.