Can Colleges Do More to Help Students Succeed?

Near the beginning of every semester, Sarah Z. Johnson has her students make her a promise: If they think about dropping the class, they will meet with her first.

While many of the students roll their eyes, “it may save at least one student a year,” says Johnson, who is a writing instructor and head of the writing center at Madison Area Technical College in Wisconsin.

In recent years, Johnson, along with many other professors, has noticed that students struggle more than ever with the jump from high school to college. They don’t know how to ask for help, struggle to complete homework and rarely participate in class.

Recent National Assessment of Educational Progress reading scores dipped to the lowest they’ve ever been, falling two points on average for fourth and eighth graders. While math scores have stayed relatively the same since 2022, the last time the test was administered, they’ve yet to hit what they were in 2019.

Some of that can be attributed to the pandemic and the loss of foundational academic and social skills during online learning. But experts say that as colleges admit increasingly diverse classes of students, their needs have changed in ways that colleges aren’t prepared for.

With new technologies and opportunities for help outside the classroom, like private tutoring or AI, wealthier students are often better equipped than their peers to enter college. As more low income and first generation students enroll, this gap has only widened. Rather than lower standards, experts say, colleges need to prepare for a new type of student — one who may not have time to complete every reading or attend every study session, but is still valuable and deserving of a quality education.

New to the ‘Game of School’

Johnson has also found that students have a difficult time asking for help in class, which is why she encourages them to consult her before considering dropping out. She says that many students, especially if they’re the first in their family to attend college, don’t know what a writing center is and even if they do, they believe getting help is a sign of failure.

Without extra support early on, many students don’t know how to play what she calls “the game of school,” Johnson says. When students are raised knowing they’ll go to college, they know the importance of attending office hours, going to the writing center and talking to their professors one-on-one. Many of Johnson’s students don’t realize that is an option, and fall behind. They also may find playing “the game” off-putting, she says, or haven’t had access to technology that can help them, like online tutoring sites, a good laptop or AI programs.

This is worse with younger students, Johnson says. Even if they received extra help, like a private tutor, they’ve never had to ask for it.

“Some of them are not ready to make that mental switch to, ‘ok, now this is my responsibility, and my teachers aren’t going to be chasing after me,’” Johnson says. “While they may care if I fail, there’s nothing saying that I can’t fail.”

Often students who are struggling will make it through about three quarters of the semester before they just stop trying, Johnson says. They usually don’t want to come talk to her because it can be uncomfortable or they don’t realize she can help them.

“I think once they get behind, they don’t like to be reminded of the fact that they’re behind,” Johnson says. “But for me, that’s one of the things that I hate the most. If I could just get them to talk to me, we can find a way to make this work.”

Mismatched Expectations

David Gooblar, an assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa, points to a “mismatch” between faculty expectations and the amount of time students can devote to their work.

In the past, it was normal to take about 15 credits per semester. But as college becomes more expensive, students want to fit more classes into less time and end up taking around 18 or sometimes even 21 credits, Gooblar says. If a student has a part time job, school and work could take up more than 80 hours of their week.

Plus, many faculty come from different backgrounds than their students. They may have earned their doctorate degree from an elite institution and were academically inclined growing up, Gooblar says. As a result, “their sense of what a college student can do is going to be more privileged than their actual college students,” he says.

“When you have that mismatch of expectations versus reality, you’re going to have a professor who’s talking to a student who isn’t there,” Gooblar says, “and a student who’s going to be kind of turned off by college because of that.”

How should colleges adapt?

Ed Venit, a managing director at EAB, an education and consulting research firm, and his colleagues have found that students entering college now will likely struggle the most in math. These students were in early middle school or ninth grade when the pandemic started, and had to take classes like pre-algebra online.

Venit predicts colleges will be experiencing what he calls the “math shark wave” of students for at least the next 10 years. Pre-algebra classes are key for students to build their foundational math skills, Venit says, and also will indicate if a student may need extra support. Now, the problem could sneak up on colleges like a shark, especially if they aren’t sure what type of help their students need, he says.

“It’s kind of lurking below the surface and it’s going to eat us at the end of the decade,” he says.

Colleges need to ensure their early courses are teaching students foundational math skills, Venit says. They should also teach students skills that will be helpful in their career paths, he adds. If a calculus class won’t help students with their career goals, he suggests incorporating different options, like statistics classes, early on.

Administrators also need to ensure they are efficiently and accurately tracking student performance in early classes, Venit says. This way, they can identify when a student needs additional help, he says.

At Radford University in Virginia, admissions teams pay close attention to how a student performed in Algebra 2 in high school, says Bethany Usher, the university’s provost and senior vice president of academic affairs. If students struggled with that class, they’ll likely have a more difficult time in college math and in their other classes in general, Usher says. Algebra 2 teaches skills like problem solving and high order thinking, she adds, which help students succeed academically overall.

If admissions officers see that students struggled in high school algebra, they’ll perform a closer review of the application to determine if the student should start at Radford or wait and potentially develop their skills at a community college, Usher says.

Radford has worked to expand its support once students get to college. In the past, the university had a strict policy that if students struggled in their first year, they likely wouldn’t be able to stay at Radford, Usher says. Now, the school is loosening that policy to give students a better chance of staying and succeeding, she says.

All Radford students have the option to take University 101, a first-year seminar class that prepares them for the transition to college, both academically and socially. If students have difficulties during their first semester, they’ll be required to take a second round of that class, called University 150.

Students receive additional academic and social help, but are also held accountable for their work, says Jerel Benton, assistant provost for academic affairs at Radford. For instance, between the third and fourth week of classes, students are expected to meet with their academic adviser to make a plan for how they will be able to recover academically, he says. This motivates them to complete their classes and gives them a person they can trust throughout their time in college.

“We’re giving students a longer runway to adapt to the college experience,” Benton says. “To learn how they are navigating the institution and the resources that are available to them.”

On a classroom level, professors should play a more active role with students, Iowa’s Gooblar says. They should be learning about their students early on in the semester and understanding what they need. Gooblar surveys his students on their personal responsibilities, such as how much they work, whether they take care of family members and whether they anticipate interruptions during the semester.

He also emphasizes the value of his class and doing the work. When students have so many responsibilities outside of the classroom, they need more motivation to complete their schoolwork. He spends time early in the semester not only telling students what they need to do, but also why he’s asking them to do it and what they should expect to learn from it.

“I need to do the work of convincing them that [the study of literature] is worth their time because they don’t have a lot of time,” Gooblar says.

Johnson at Madison College requires her students to meet with her once or twice a semester. While it can be time consuming, it ensures she’ll at least have some one-on-one time to talk with them, especially if they’re struggling in her class, she says.

Finding “ways to help students feel that they are part of a community and that they’re cared about one way or the other,” is essential, Johnson says.

College administrators and professors need to remember that the range of students attending college has significantly changed in recent years, Usher says. That’s both because of the pandemic and because a bigger variety of students are being welcomed to campus, she adds.

Rather than lowering expectations or getting frustrated, they need to find ways to adapt and learn how to support the students that are coming in now, she says.

“The narrative of everybody’s less well prepared is actually not as [helpful], as we need to be prepared for having really capable students coming in,” Usher says, “and continue to broaden the range of what we think a college student is.”