One of my favorite exercises in higher education has been identifying overlaps and places where we waste time and effort. On one campus I worked with, there were four instances of the same student experience platform: one for the graduate division, one for undergraduate, one for the business college, and another for engineering. We were paying for the same system four times, with four customized and edited versions, and still we had no way of knowing what support a student needed across those offices.
The question sounds simple, but it is not. In its 2026 Top Issues in Student Affairs report, NASPA identified “increasing institution-wide collaboration to deliver coordinated student success supports” as the No. 1 issue facing student affairs. With 75% of respondents rating it as very important, the issue reflects a growing recognition that student success depends not only on the resources institutions provide but also on how effectively those resources work together. The problem may no longer be that colleges lack student success programs. Instead, we may have too many programs, too many systems, and too many offices working toward similar goals without enough coordination.
Higher education has become very good at developing specialized expertise. Specialization itself is not the problem. Fragmentation is. A student does not experience these offices separately; a student experiences the institution. Yet our organizational structures often require students to navigate multiple departments, websites, appointment systems, forms, and referral processes to find the support they need. What appears to the institution as a collection of well-designed services can feel to a student like a maze of too many options.
Consider a student who is struggling academically while also worrying about money, questioning their major, working 20 hours a week, and trying to determine whether they belong in college. The institution may see five separate issues, each with its own office, staff members, procedures, and technology (advising, career services, basic needs, registrar, financial aid). However, the student experiences just one interconnected set of challenges — their life.
When a student crosses organization chart lines, each office possesses a valuable piece of the story and none of them knows the whole experience. Without appropriate information sharing and coordinated processes, staff members may not understand the full range of challenges affecting the student's situation. Even when everyone recognizes the need for intervention, the institution may leave the student responsible for assembling the available supports. When institutions measure the number of referrals made, appointments held, and emails answered rather than whether students successfully connected with resources, they risk confusing activity with outcomes.
Institutional fragmentation does not affect all students equally. Students who arrive with strong social networks, prior knowledge of higher education, and confidence navigating bureaucratic systems may be better equipped to identify resources and persist through complicated processes. They know which questions to ask, whom to contact, and when to follow up. Students with less institutional knowledge or fewer available hours may find the same processes much more difficult to navigate.
For students balancing employment, family responsibilities, transportation challenges, or other obligations, every additional appointment, referral, form, and unanswered email represents a cost. A student who cannot attend an appointment during business hours may never reach the office to which they were referred. Someone unfamiliar with institutional terminology may not understand which service they need. Another student may interpret repeated referrals as evidence that they do not belong. They all lose trust in the institution as a whole.
This is why coordination is more than an operational efficiency issue. It is an equity issue. When institutions require students to navigate unnecessary complexity to access support, they place the greatest burden on those who may have the fewest resources to manage it. A coordinated system reduces that burden by making support easier to find, understand, and use.
NASPA's identification of institution-wide collaboration as the leading issue in student affairs reflects a challenge that many higher education professionals already recognize. Colleges have no shortage of people who care about students or programs intended to help them. The challenge is connecting that expertise into a coherent, accessible system of support.
Doing so requires institutions to clarify responsibilities, reduce duplicated outreach, improve appropriate information sharing, and design referrals as genuine handoffs. It also means evaluating success not simply by whether an office completed its assigned tasks but by whether students received the support they needed. These changes require leadership, collaboration, and a willingness to reconsider established practices.
The future of student success may depend less on creating the next program and more on connecting the programs institutions already have. Students do not need another office to visit or another system to learn. They need an institution that recognizes how their needs intersect and makes it easier to find the right support at the right time.
The question is no longer simply how many resources an institution provides. It is whether students can experience those resources as parts of one coherent system. Institutional coordination means designing student support around the student's journey rather than expecting students to navigate the institution's silos. If NASPA's 2026 findings tell us anything, it is that connecting those four platforms or those five offices into a single model of student support — connecting the work we already do and building trust — may be among the most important investments higher education can make in student success.
Dr. Thomas Dickson serves as Strategic Product Advisor at Advisor AI, bringing more than 25 years of higher education leadership experience. His work has focused on advancing experiential learning and supporting first-generation students, including through his former role as Assistant Vice Provost. A longtime member of NACADA and ACPA, he holds a doctorate in higher education administration, with doctoral research examining advisor job functions.