College enrollment in the fall semester is projected to be 19.6 million—a slight increase from the 19.3 million last year. While this growth signals a cautious recovery for institutions following the declines of the COVID-19 pandemic, it remains a far cry from when enrollment peaked at 21 million students in 2010.
Higher education is in a fragile state. Despite enrollment modestly improving today, a shrinking population of young learners means they will soon face a demographic decline.
Meanwhile, growing concerns about the cost and value of higher education continue to proliferate. To fully restore public trust in higher education, leaders need to fully understand why that faith is eroding in the first place.
In most other industries, the answer would be straightforward: talk to your end users. From my perspective as a product designer and co-founder of an education technology platform, products succeed or fail based on how well they meet the needs of the people who rely on them.
Higher education has an opportunity to follow in these footsteps. Institutions can strengthen collaboration and confidence in their systems by connecting more with those most impacted by design and policy decisions, but historically sidelined in the process: the students.
How to change the culture
My company unifies degree planning, registration and advising into one platform. Over the course of more than 500 demonstrations of our technology with colleges and universities, students were present only a handful of times.
Indeed, students rarely have a seat at the table when institutions roll out new systems, redesign processes, or adopt technology. This omission creates friction, inefficiency and frustration in the systems intended to support them.
Institutions need a new way forward that centers the learner. Students should not be treated as passive recipients of decisions, but as valuable partners in shaping the future of higher education.
Research shows that students consistently feel left out of institutional conversations. In one recent survey, only 21% of students said they had made their voice heard on an issue that mattered to them on campus.
Even among those who did speak up, many doubted that their concerns would lead to meaningful action from administrators. Half of the students surveyed said they were unsure where they would even go if they had an issue they wanted to raise. This disconnect suggests that leaders are underestimating both the practical and cultural benefits of student partnership.
The very act of student partnership changes the culture of an institution. Research shows that when colleges actively work with learners to include their voice, students have increased motivation, experience stronger feelings of belonging and feel more engaged. This is a crucial lesson for colleges and universities seeking to regain student trust.
Institutions should adopt practices that bring student input into technology adoption, governance, and redesign efforts. This means inviting students into vendor evaluations, pilot testing, and feedback sessions so their perspectives shape technology before it is widely implemented. Colleges can also build ongoing feedback loops that capture real-time input rather than relying on occasional snapshots.
Perhaps most importantly, institutions should recognize students as experts in their own experience. Their daily interactions with campus systems make their contributions essential to creating solutions that work. This doesn’t mean student voices should replace those of faculty, technologists, or administrators, but it does mean that they must be treated as one of many perspectives vital to effective decision-making.
This is about more than just student representation: it’s about allowing students to advise on what can enrich their own experience.
Making students genuine partners
Some institutions already treat student participation as a vital part of their institutional governance. Since 1982, the Texas A&M University System has had a Chancellor’s Student Advisory Council, using it as an instrumental body for fostering communication between students and system leadership.
The council operates directly under Texas A&M’s Office of Academic Affairs to ensure these groups can coordinate with one another seamlessly. The group also receives financial support for its activities and initiatives from the Chancellor’s private sector advisors.
Meanwhile, Bellevue College and Moreno Valley College have learner participation integrated into their governance structures, allowing students to voice their opinions on institutional infrastructure, college-wide resource allocation and initiatives for student success.
It’s time to make students genuine partners in the enterprise of higher education. By doing so, colleges and universities will not only create better systems and policies for those they serve, but also cultivate future generations of graduates who feel ownership of the institutions they attended.
Restoring trust starts with listening to the people who know the learner experience the best: the students themselves.
