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According to a new analysis of Student Voice data, students want more help navigating their way to a degree. One in four believe their college or university could best promote their academic success by creating or clarifying academic program maps and pathways and/or guided pathways.
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In Inside Higher Ed’s new annual Student Voice survey with Generation Lab, 5,025 two- and four-year respondents weigh in on what institutional actions would most promote their academic success.
Unsurprisingly, many of the top responses from a list of academic-focused actions relate to teaching. More than anything, students want institutions to encourage faculty members to 1) limit high-stakes exams, 2) help students better connect what they’re learning to issues outside of class and/or their career goals, and 3) get to know students better—in that order. This corresponds with previous Student Voice findings about what students say helps them learn and much of what is otherwise known about what today’s students want from their professors.
Yet another relatively popular response in this most recent survey suggests that students want more help navigating their way to a degree: one in four (26 percent) believes their college or university could best promote their academic success by creating or clarifying academic program maps and pathways and/or guided pathways. And while many community colleges are currently engaged in this kind of work, four-year college respondents to the Student Voice survey are somewhat more likely than their two-year counterparts to say they want more support in this area (28 percent versus 23 percent, respectively). Continuing-generation students are also slightly more likely than their first-generation counterparts to say they want this (28 percent versus 24 percent). Even a quarter (25 percent) of fourth-year students—those closest to graduation—say they want their institution to create and/or clarify academic programs maps and pathways and/or guided pathways.
In a separate question asking what broader, student experience–focused actions would best promote their academic success, the largest share of students (55 percent) say they want their institutions to make tuition more affordable. Another popular answer: creating more research opportunities for undergraduates (31 percent). But more than one in four students (28 percent) also say they want their institutions to introduce or enhance online platforms to help them plan and track their degree progress—another signal that students want more help planning and navigating their academic path through college. Two- and four-year students are equally likely to select this.
Academic advisers have historically guided students in their decisions about what to study and which courses to take and when. But advising as a field is underresourced, with many advisers tasked with heavy caseloads. Additionally, students don’t always reach out for one-on-one support.
These and other factors mean that many students are going without key guidance: in a separate 2023 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse, just over half (55 percent) of two- and four-year respondents said that they’d received guidance on required courses and course sequences needed for graduation via the advising process. That includes 57 percent of fourth-year students, meaning newer students weren’t skewing the results. Additionally, about one in 10 students each said they’d experienced things like being told by an adviser to take a class that wasn’t actually available to them because they were missing a prerequisite.
The overall advising gap in that 2023 survey was even bigger for nonwhite students, with clear implications for equity. In this newest survey, which asked a different group of respondents a different set of questions, white students were no more likely than those from other racial groups to say they wanted their institutions to create or clarify academic program maps and pathways and/or guided pathways.
Chat bots are helping close the advising gap at some institutions. At Southern New Hampshire University, for instance, a chat bot called Penny has helped boost persistence rates—and retention for first-time students, in particular, by some 4.6 percentage points. The university makes clear that Penny isn’t a replacement but rather a supplement to human advisers, as it’s actually increased student-adviser engagements by proactively reaching out to students to help identify persistence barriers.
Still, chat bots aren’t a panacea, and the help they can offer at this point doesn’t rise to the level that one in four students seems to be asking for: innovation and clarity around academic program maps and pathways.
Guided Pathways
What can help here? Guided pathways reforms, now in place at hundreds of community colleges, are designed to offer the student more structured support from enrollment to completion and center four principles, as articulated by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College:
- Clarify paths to student education and career goals
- Help students get on a path
- Keep students on path
- Ensure students are learning across programs
One aim is to help students save money and time by not taking extra courses. Specific reforms include mandating academic and career planning, organizing programs by “meta majors” or areas of interest, and providing extra academic support in college-level math and English classes. Two recent studies of guided pathways found that while these initiatives take time and effort to launch, they’re paying off by some student success metrics—though certain combinations of reforms are more effective than others. Another study takeaway: intentionally address equity and inclusion within these efforts.
Scholars at CCRC, among others, promote guided pathways as a fix to what’s been the “cafeteria,” or self-serve, model of higher education that many community colleges adopted decades ago, which expanded access but didn’t necessarily promote student success (and, of course, the concept of student success has evolved in the interim). And while guided pathways remain rooted in community colleges, they’ve begun to influence the four-year sphere.
The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Florida, working with researchers at West Virginia University, Howard University and Appalachian State University, published a guided pathways model prior to the pandemic focused on access-oriented four-year institutions, for instance.
The model covers four periods of the student journey: on-ramps and recruitment, lower-division and then upper-division courses and the transition out of college. Model “domains” or considerations include interventions, pressure/friction points and essential institutional capacities for each part of the journey. One embedded case study or example of reform is the University of Memphis’s Finish Line program, targeting students who have completed 90 or more credit hours but left college without a credential.
Academic Plans and Program Mapping
Institutions don’t necessarily have to adopt entire guided pathways initiatives to offer students more clarity. Shanna Smith Jaggars, assistant vice provost and director of the Student Success Research Lab at the Ohio State University, and co-author of the 2015 book Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success, says that while creating and clarifying program maps is just one component of guided pathways, it’s a “foundational component and often a necessary first step for colleges as they rethink curricula, onboarding, advising and other processes around the goal of helping students choose and make progress on their pathway.”
Still, Jaggars says that creating program maps and the related task of re-examining curricula—like whether calculus is a truly a necessary prerequisite for many science courses—haven’t proved to be low-hanging fruit in the student success movement. That is, curricular decisions and revisions “require faculty leadership, time investment and approval, and so it’s politically and logistically easier to focus attention on other reforms which don’t require faculty to be involved.”
Academic advisers can and do sometimes create program maps on their own to help students navigate academic pathways and course sequencing, Jaggars says, “but if the curriculum itself is poorly structured or overly complex, then it’s impossible to make the map clear and helpful.”
Watermark, an educational technology company, recommends that degree road maps contain course-sequencing information, prerequisites and milestones, elective recommendations, and registration deadlines and related policies.
Measuring the Impact of an Academic Plan
Academic plans can lay out a student’s intended course schedule for future academic terms, increasing efficiency in time to degree, especially if the underlying planning structure provides guidance on program requirements and course sequencing. Another benefit is that institutions can use such plans to inform course scheduling: According to one 2023 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse, a quarter of community college students and closer to a third of four-year students said a course they needed to graduate wasn’t available the term they wanted to take it.
According to one analysis involving community college and university students by EAB, an education consulting firm, students who made a formal plan attempted 2.68 more credit hours each term than peers who didn’t, on average. Students who completed a plan were more likely to re-enroll, as well, registering for the next semester at a rate 28 percentage points higher than peers without plan.
Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at CCRC, a research professor in education and social policy at Teachers College, and one of Jaggars’s co-authors, says that after many years of studying student success, “one finding I’m very certain of is that students like having an academic plan that lays out what they need to take to complete their programs. They appreciate them even more if colleges use the plans to schedule the courses students need when they need them.”
Jenkins adds that helping students explore interests and develop individualized academic plans is a central practice in guided pathways, “which of course many community colleges nationally are using to motivate and inform whole-college reforms.”
Yet he says it was actually four-year institutions, not community colleges, that pioneered work on individualized student plans and other foundational guided pathways practices. So while guided pathways is now influencing four-year education, certain fundamental guided pathways components originated in that space. Florida State University’s Degree Progress application, for example, provides a comprehensive list of degree requirements and allows students to create and manage a term-by-term personalized pathway.
In another example, institutions like Central New Mexico Community College and Purdue University are using an AI-assisted tool called Smart Plan to help students map out what courses they need to take, and when, based on their declared major.
Justin Ortagus, associate professor of higher education administration and policy and director of the Institute of Higher Education at Florida, says that there’s arguably room for more guided pathways conversations at the four-year level, especially at access-oriented four-year institutions with limited resources. But students broadly benefit from help trying to decide what to study when, he says, comparing that at times overwhelming process to picking something to order from the Cheesecake Factory’s extensive menu (if you know, you know).
“There’s so many pathways, there’s so many majors and minors, that students can be overwhelmed,” he says. “So providing some semblance of a pathway or a structure or a map is paramount, whether the student is low income, first generation or just the student who is trying to better understand what makes sense for their major in their individual academic experience.”
Course Sequencing
Beyond the four-year guided pathways model, Ortagus is currently working on a spin-off research project about course sequencing. It involves analyzing transcript data from thousands of students, to see what courses they took, in what order, and the possible effects of those choices on their likelihood of graduating.
“We identify high-attrition combinations, high-attrition sequencing or timing of courses, and try to have a data-driven approach to better understand optimal strategies for students who are thinking about course sequencing for individual majors,” he says. Student demographics and academic characteristics are all part of the analysis, as is course modality: Do students perform better in certain high-attrition courses when taking them, say, face-to-face versus online?
Asked whether individualized plans and more structured pathways risk compromising intellectual exploration—like reducing a student’s chances of taking a course that’s off track for their major but nonetheless worthwhile—Ortagus says it’s not either-or.
“To me that really is the spirit of higher education: trying to ensure that students are not only getting furniture of the mind and learning in broad ways, but also having room to take the courses they need to graduate and improve the socioeconomic status of their lives.”
Does your institution collect student data on courses choices and sequencing to determine possible effects on retention and graduation? Tell us about it.
