Student Journey Gap Analysis
Case study · AI Tools & Strategy · UX Design
We are not naming specific fixes yet. Those come only after the study is scored and its findings are confirmed. What follows is the approach: how a ranked gap becomes a piloted AI fix, and the three shapes those fixes take.
How a gap becomes a pilot
When the study is scored, the domain will group barriers into themes and rank each on two axes. Reach is how many of the roughly 140,000 students would plausibly hit it. Severity is the Nielsen 0 to 4 rating, the mean of at least three independent raters. The two are plotted on a matrix, not multiplied into one score, so a small friction that every student meets sits alongside a rare but dramatic failure. The highest-reach, highest-severity gaps are where the first pilots go. Every option is screened against the no-student-data line, and we recommend and pilot the most promising to prove it helps before anything scales. Deciding what to fix stays staff-led; no one is replaced.
The three shapes an AI fix takes
Build a tool
A small, purpose-built assistant, built with staff and, where it fits, by student teams. Human in the loop, no student data.
Buy or plug in a tool
An existing, vetted tool configured into a system the colleges already use, when that is the lightest thing that helps.
Create a workflow
An AI-assisted workflow or agent built with the department that owns the service, to take routine, repetitive work off staff.
This is proven elsewhere
Connection-focused, AI-assisted support has moved persistence at other colleges. These are the models the design learns from, not findings of this study.
Georgia State University
An AI chatbot answering enrollment, financial-aid, and deadline questions cut summer melt by 22 percent and lifted persistence, used most by first-generation and Pell students.
CUNY ASAP
Wraparound support, advising, money, transit, and tutoring, more than doubled three-year graduation, 53 percent versus 24.6 percent, and has been replicated at more than 60 colleges.
Valencia College
Connected advising raised the match between students’ plans and the courses they actually took from 43 percent to 60 percent, an Aspen Prize model.
Caring Campus
Connection as a staff practice, now at more than 120 colleges, the human infrastructure that makes AI-assisted outreach meaningful.
Sources: Georgia State University’s Pounce chatbot and its summer-melt reduction (success.gsu.edu); CUNY ASAP’s doubling of three-year graduation, from the independent MDRC evaluation (mdrc.org); Valencia College’s advising results, an Aspen Prize institution (Aspen Institute College Excellence Program); and Caring Campus from the Institute for Evidence-Based Change (iebcnow.org).
No specific fixes or findings are named here; the ranked recommendations come only after the study is scored and human-validated. The examples above are established practice at other institutions, not results of this study.