The Student Experience in Higher Education Is Changing Faster Than the Support Systems Built for It
The student experience in higher education that most institutional policy was designed around — a full-time student whose main obligation is coursework — describes a shrinking share of the actual student body. The 2025 Student Academic Experience Survey, run by Advance HE and the Higher Education Policy Institute across more than 10,000 undergraduates, found that 68% of full-time students were doing paid work during term time, up from 56% the year before and just 42% in 2020. Independent study time dropped in parallel, from 13.6 hours a week to 11.6. That shift is consistent with a broader pattern showing up across higher ed more generally, as rising costs push more students into work while enrolled, not just before or after.
The mismatch this creates
Attendance policies, office hour windows, deadline structures, and advising models were mostly built for a student with few competing obligations. A student now juggling a job, coursework, and often caregiving or financial pressure doesn’t experience a missed deadline or a skipped office hours slot the way institutional policy assumes they do. The gap between the student experience policy was designed for and the one students are actually living is exactly where disengagement and quiet attrition tend to start.
Why this isn’t primarily a policy-rewrite problem
The instinct is to solve this with new policies: more flexible deadlines, asynchronous options, expanded hours. Those help, but they don’t solve the underlying issue on their own, because policy flexibility only works if the staff and faculty applying it can accurately read which students actually need it and why. A rigid policy applied without judgment fails a struggling student; so does a flexible policy applied by someone who doesn’t notice the student needs it in the first place.
Where empathy training becomes the actual delivery mechanism
This is the piece that’s easy to skip when redesigning for the modern student experience: giving faculty and advising staff a trained, consistent capacity to recognize when a student’s absence or missed deadline reflects a 30-hour work week rather than disengagement — and to respond in a way that keeps that student moving forward instead of falling further behind. Empathy training operationalizes exactly this. It’s what turns a flexible policy on paper into a policy that actually gets applied correctly to the students who need it.
Without that layer, institutions end up with generous-looking policies that quietly still fail the students working the most hours, because nobody on staff is positioned — or trained — to notice and act on it in time.
The planning implication for 2026
Redesigning the student experience in higher education for a population that looks less like 2019’s isn’t primarily a scheduling exercise. It’s a staff capacity exercise: making sure the people setting deadlines, running office hours, and fielding student requests can tell the difference between a student who’s disengaging and one who’s stretched thin — and know how to respond to each differently. That distinction, made consistently across a campus, is what actually closes the gap between the policy on paper and the experience students are living.