Student Journey Barriers Study

AI Strategy · Adoption · Case study

This is a formative study, not a summative one. It runs in rounds, and each round is analyzed before the next is designed. The findings themselves stay unpublished until the domain confirms them.

Where the study stands

The register holds thirty-four candidate barriers. Every severity is tester-assigned and pending human rating. Nothing here is a confirmed district finding, and the barriers themselves stay unpublished until the domain has reviewed them.

Round log

• Round 1a · 27 July 2026 · A district-wide findability sweep, eleven persona runs, and three end-to-end walks of the full enrollment funnel. The same barrier types recurred across colleges within the first handful of runs, which said the instrument was working.
• Round 1b · 25 August 2026 · Forty-four scenarios drawn from the bank, narrowed to specific service paths. Four first-pass claims collapsed when the pages were actually opened, which produced a stricter evidence rule for testers.
• Round 1c · proposed · A channel-discovery round. Where do students actually go first when they hit a problem?

What the first two rounds established

A single mechanism accounts for most of what both rounds found, and it is more useful than any individual barrier: retrieval matches vocabulary, not need. A page ranks on a student’s query when it contains the student’s word, and does not when it contains only the service’s name. The services exist. The language of need exists. They sit in different documents.

The open question shaping the next round

Both rounds so far tested one channel: the public college website. The study assumes a student with a problem goes to the website. That is likely true for some students and it is certainly not true for all of them. A student who needs help could reasonably start at any of these, and the corpus covers exactly one:

• The public college website. Rounds 1a and 1b, the only channel tested.
• The signed-in student portal. Phase 2, not started.
• Canvas, where an enrolled student already spends their time.
• The chat widget on the college home page.
• A student mobile app, if one exists at that college.
• The phone.
• A person. An instructor, a friend, a family member who went here.

It does not invalidate the findings. It bounds them: they are findings about the public web, on the public web.

The study at full scope

The numbers below are the designed extent of the study, not what has run.