Welcome to BIF’s Student Experience Lab. As champions for audacious change, our mission is to channel the voice of the student into action by building a real-world, collaborative innovation platform to help education transform itself. We invite you to join us on this epic adventure.
Learn MoreCheck out some of the activities going on in the lab.
What if we put students in the driver’s seat of a new kind of R&D to transform higher education? One that provided a platform for engaging students more fully in a real world effort that also involved faculty, and university administrators? Could we improve a student’s education experience? Yes. Could we take it a step further and transform higher education itself? Yes.
The Student Experience Lab partnered with the College Board to better understand and develop opportunities to enhance the educational experiences of young men of color. By engaging young male Asian American/Pacific Islanders, African Americans, Hispanic/Latinos, and Native Americans directly to understand how they view their experiences, we add their important voice to the innovation discussion of how to better meet their needs, improve their experience and lead them toward degree attainment.
Here's what we believe: The current U.S. post-secondary education system does not deliver, at sufficient scale or affordable price, a high-quality college experience that prepares all students with the skills they need to fully participate in the 21st century global economy. With this problem in mind, the Student Experience Lab set to map the environmental and human factors that are the most significant drivers of the college student experience.
News, views, and student voices from the Student Experience Lab
On October 29, 2011, 40 students, ages 12-22, traveled from all corner’s of Rhode Island’s public education system, to answer one simple question: can we create a student experience that enables all students to thrive? Their insights and passion for the design challenge will inspire you.
An ongoing mechanism of change delivering the voices and experiences of students nationwide. Learn more
Middle-school student Cassandra Lin admires “the unexpected hero.” She loves the YouTube story about a young boy from Malawi who created windmills out of bicycle parts to generate electricity for his village. “I think that was great,” Cassandra says. “Even though he never finished school, he built windmills. He learned on his own. Nobody expected a Malawian kid to generate electricity.”
And nobody expected a kid from Westerly, RI, to create an award-winning recycling program called T.G.I.F. that generates fuel for the needy in her community. But that’s exactly what this sparkly, no-nonsense seventh grader has done. To Cassandra, it’s all no big deal. It’s what she does with her friends after school.
Choosing a school is only the first step in planning an academic career. After making a selection, students must match interests and passions with academic programs, extracurricular activities, internships, and other opportunities and then make important decisions about their college experience. Unfortunately, many students operate with little to no information about how to construct an experience that will meet their long-term professional and personal goals.
Regardless of the actual capabilities of the education pipeline today, young men of color have trouble understanding their options and navigating the system while concurrently managing the circumstances of their lives. Their individual situations points simply to the reality that this group has to be unusually creative and resilient when it comes to earning a degree.
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