If ever there was a time to bring groups together to more efficiently and effectively support student success, it is now.
Over the last 40 years, professional staff grew 5.7 times faster than enrollment. Campus facilities have grown twice as fast as enrollment over the last two decades.
Since 2013, technology spending per person has increased 113% among colleges. Forty percent of private nonprofit institutions and 20% of public institutions are running deficits.
Colleges and universities have been steadily spending more on support services, staff and systems but completion rates have only shown marginal improvement because the way we support students is stuck in silos. Adapting to change by always adding has left us with confusing curricula, outdated processes and unsustainable costs.
5 steps of a winning formula
The University of Miami provides an instructive case study on what it takes to move from separate support functions spread across campus to a learning commons where everyone works together to help students succeed. It’s a winning formula colleges and universities can follow to unlock collaboration, boost efficiency and meaningfully improve student outcomes.
Let’s go through these one at a time.
1. Governance to enable decision making: Projects don’t fail because of bad ideas. They fail because of bad decisions.
Collaboration depends on defining how you’ll make decisions before it’s time to make them. This includes who will provide input, how, and when. It means designing how you’ll decide; for example, by consent, consensus, majority vote.
University of Miami’s steering committee made decisions swiftly—avoiding ‘analysis paralysis’—by including cross-functional representation empowered to align spaces, services, and staffing with the institution’s goals and operate it collaboratively.
2. Strategy that provides focus: Good governance isn’t enough though. Collaboration alone won’t fix your problem if the underlying strategy is broken; for example if you have competing analytics courses spread across the curriculum or separate teams of instructional designers supporting online and on-campus programs.
The best definition of strategy comes from strategy guru and former business school dean Roger Martin: strategy is choosing “where to play” and describing “how to win.” Your strategy must provide focus, define goals and establish metrics.
The strategy that guided the Commons was defining future student competencies like working on a team and working with data. These created the common ground to bring groups together and rally around a shared sense of what success looked like—and paved the way to identify the support services to offer, how to staff them and what spaces and technology would be required.
3. Structure to define roles: Organizational charts and team roles should reflect how work gets done, not how turf is defended. Too often, boxes on an org chart become walls in a space.
Miami avoided these two pitfalls by designing a service model based on future student competencies rather than departmental real estate. By determining how services would be provided—relocating a group, creating a satellite presence or through programming like workshops and consultations—they created a flexible, ‘future-proofed’ environment that serves students, not hierarchies.
4. Shared spaces to work together in: Bringing people together in the same space fuels collaboration and builds community. Co-locating previously disparate teams fosters informal interaction, learning and culture-building.
The Commons brought together teams from five buildings in flexible, shared spaces. This enabled easy referrals; for example, a research consultation about a paper uncovering opportunities for help with writing or data analysis.
More than that, it established a community of practice among staff working together to better support students—and each other.
5. Culture of assessment for continuous improvement: A critical part of any strategic plan or project is establishing metrics to measure success and determining the cadence to review progress and make adjustments. This helps establish a culture of continuous improvement.
Assessment has been integral to the Learning Commons since its inception. Each year, they publish an overview of the services provided and the students impacted.
From this ongoing assessment and improvement, Miami’s Learning Commons tells an inspiring story. In 2023, it helped 5,618 students with research, 4,318 with writing, 2,594 with tutoring, 2,160 with data and GIS, and 4,805 with tech support.
While many factors contribute to retention, it’s notable that Miami has grown its rate from 90% to 94% since the Commons started providing integrated support in 2017.
Don’t add student success services by default
While sharing spaces, streaming technology and redesigning support services might require investing time and money, there is clear ROI from reduced costs and increased revenue. Eliminating redundancies in staffing, technology purchases and disparate facility costs across siloed groups lowers costs.
Meanwhile improving staff productivity, increasing retention and improving student satisfaction all drive revenue. Whether you are small or large, well-resourced or under-resourced, it’s time to stop adding separate support services, systems and spaces by default.
Follow this proven formula to break down silos, share data and spaces, and work better together in connected colleges where students succeed.
