Opening with a disturbing example of how outmoded university structures can jeopardize a vulnerable student’s future, Chapter 1 introduces the structural lag between an increasingly diverse student generation that grew up with the smartphone and its easy access to information and the fragmented practices of the university. This gap is deepened by societal crucibles in contemporary American life, including the pandemic, economic change, extremism, climate change, and structural racism. By forcing universities online, the pandemic highlighted how important campus life is to students, the learning process, and how much of the university experience takes place outside the classroom. As universities prepare for post-pandemic education, they must take long-discussed and long-delayed steps to critically examine their history, address the bifurcation between faculty and service staff, reform their semi-independent institutional structures, and coordinate the array of student services toward the goal of a student-centered and holistic university experience.

Faculty power within American universities is supported by tradition and reinforced by academic associations organized by field at national and regional levels. Those associations help maintain high academic standards in a field, encourage communication about research, acculturate graduate students and junior faculty, and contribute to the hiring process. They also may serve as guardrails encouraging research in core interests of the field, a barrier circumvented by the proliferation of research centers and institutes that can cross department lines. Academic associations typically pay little attention to the student experience. Periodic accreditation reviews are one of the few opportunities to evaluate universities on support to students, but still, generally miss detailed information on whether student needs are being met. Students and society, benefit from the creative energy of the faculty and their generation and transmission of knowledge. Mechanisms to foster greater faculty involvement around the student experience are encouraged.

In the early twentieth century, American universities began hiring professionals to support student life outside the classroom. Deans of women pioneered the new field of student affairs, emphasizing holistic, not just intellectual education, and creating their own national professional associations. After WWII, men coming out of the military began to displace women from leadership roles in student services and oversaw the expansion of the fragmented field we have today. The chapter traces the growth, evolution, professionalization, and organizational complexity typical of student affairs since the mid-twentieth century. In the same period, attempts to more closely coordinate fragmented national student service associations failed. Currently, growing costs for student services threaten higher fees for students. Potential savings through modernizing and integrating services have yet to be fully explored. Meanwhile, current fragmentation on campus has negative implications for a vision of a more integrated and holistic educational experience.

Behind its apparent hierarchical structure, the university is a complex, fragmented organization of semi-autonomous units. Changing it depends on a clear understanding of its history, power dynamics, and processes. Traditions of tenure, shared governance, and academic freedom give faculty unique authority. Professional staff work in a more typical hierarchy in a host of distinct offices. Professional staff providing services directly to students oversee much of their campus life. Atop this decentralized structure, the university president answers to multiple outside constituencies, manages the internal complexity, and often fundraises as well. Theoretical frameworks to understand decision-making in the modern university range from “organized anarchy” to a “loosely coupled federation” to a professional bureaucracy operating through committees, often ad hoc, to address problems. But perhaps the key insight is the politicization of the siloed nature of university operations, which leads to inefficiency, frustration, and in several shameful cases, to abusive treatment of students.

College can be overwhelming, as hundreds of YouTube videos produced by students across the country document. In 2015, American University began to systematically collect data on the overall student experience, using focus groups, surveys, workshops, retreats, and a voluntary and anonymous journaling project. Information was drawn from faculty, administrators, and staff as well. More than sixty “pinch points,” encounters with university operations that particularly chafed students, were identified. Excerpts from one student’s journal underline how devastating these encounters, or lack thereof, can be. The review also chronicled disturbing examples of racism, hate crimes, and antisemitism, paralleling experiences at other American universities. With the data in hand, AU administration was able to quickly resolve some of the pinch points. Others took more time, and some remain unresolved. The exercise confirmed the central point that all campus encounters, not just those in the classroom, can powerfully affect a student’s success and well-being.

A plan to create student-centered universities on American campuses has three broad categories: transform the undergraduate experience; redesign administrative policies and practices; change university culture. Examples of specific steps include fostering peer, advisor, and mentor relationships for students at the earliest stages of their academic careers; ensuring physical and mental health support; creating a welcoming multicultural organization; a case management approach with timely information to assist with early intervention. Among other innovations: a university experience officer to oversee greater alignment across loosely coupled administrative divisions and an ombudsperson to resolve specific issues. These and the other suggested steps will require an increased initial investment but should result in longer-term savings by avoiding many expensive consequences of the current fragmented system. The book concludes that American democracy itself, as well as other societal challenges, are increasingly in need of a more effective university role in creating an educated citizenry.

Most colleges and universities have enterprise resource planning (ERP) data systems that provide decision-makers accurate and timely information on business, finance, personnel, payroll, enrollment, and budget functions. But there is no digital strategy for a holistic support system for students. Information on student interactions usually is separated within dozens of frequently incompatible data systems designed for individual service areas, cutting off a critical source of timely insight on a student’s aggregate experience. Federal law protecting student privacy is an additional, legitimate, limit on the flow of information about students to those who might provide them with needed support. To bring data management and information flow on student support up to the expectations of the current generation of technology-sophisticated students, the university will need a radical rethinking of what is necessary for a student data strategy.

While its history goes back nearly four hundred years, the basic structure and traditions of the American university began to emerge in the late nineteenth century and crystallized roughly one hundred years ago. America’s growing economic, technological, and political power influenced the adoption of professional principles of organization and administration similar to those that underlay corporate entities. However, one development unique to universities was greater autonomy for faculty. Research became a defining characteristic of prominent universities, and philanthropy and government support helped spur that growth. Administrative and service staff grew steadily in numbers and with greater professionalism. After World War II, enrollments surged, and the American university entered a “golden age.” Passions and politics growing out of the civil rights and antiwar movements began to affect the university in the 1960s. The politicized questioning of the university’s role continues today, with the added factor of a dramatically more diverse student body.

In 2009, American University shifted the bulk of its financial aid from merit- to need-based, leading to a more diverse student body. Concurrently, academic performance rose but student sense of belongingness diverged by race. Support services were plentiful, but not necessarily well matched. In 2015, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, AU explored an integrated approach to student support. Re-inventing the Student Experience (RiSE) involved faculty, students, administrators, and staff in workshops, retreats, surveys, and examinations of best practices in higher education as well as innovative approaches outside the university, all aimed at uniting the entire campus in supporting student well-being. After the grant, AU continued to fund RiSE internally. Major outcomes included new required first-year courses; a new role for some faculty as “guides,” who both teach and serve as primary contacts for accessing university services; a greatly revised core curriculum; and improvement in student engagement.

Despite their world-wide reputation, American colleges and universities graduate only about half their students in four years. Rates for students of color are significantly lower. Unless the lag between university structure and practices and today’s more diverse and more stressed generation of students is addressed, the situation will not improve. The traditional hierarchical structure organized around separate functions often leaves students caught, sometimes with drastic consequences, between administrative silos. In the private sector, that functional structure has given way to the integration of artificial intelligence, data analytics, and smart devices in pursuit of more seamless constituent service. Significant research on student retention and success already exists, but less is focused on structural and cultural changes in the institution. Several prominent institutions have begun the process of rethinking and integrating curriculum and faculty and staff functions toward the goal of a “student-centered university” focused on a holistic student experience.