Since 2009, the Student Experience Lab has traveled the country logging hundreds of hours listening, observing and analyzing how students interact with America’s educational system. We’ve explored the social, emotional, and environmental factors that propel or hinder their success. And we’ve uncovered some interesting insights into how and why the system needs a big time jolt of innovation. We invite you to explore our findings and inject your own experiences and points-of-view into the story. New updates added regularly! Subscribe for notifications.
What if we put students in the driver’s seat of a new kind of R&D to transform education? One that provided a platform for engaging students more fully in a real world effort that also involved faculty, administrators, support services and more? Could we improve a student’s education experience? Could we take it a step further and transform higher education itself?
The Lab's study to understand the experiences of young men of color as they get in, get ready and get through college reveals that money worries are a substantial barrier to degree attainment. Says Frank, an African-American student attending a community college: "I have to choose whether to miss a class or miss out on a check."
Here's a surprising student insight from the Lab's study to understand the experiences of young men of color as they get in, get ready and (hopefully) get through college: Very few men we talked to felt that their poor academic preparation was an insurmountable barrier to graduation or was a determinant for dropping out, but learning to cope with workload is a daily challenge.
Young men of color who have already been through an experience are a rich source of support and value working to support others.
In 2011, 29 undergraduates at Utah State University spent a year attempting to create a "utopian experience" for students on campus. The work wasn't a breeze. It challenged many long-standing beliefs and assumptions about learning and education. Hear what struggles students encountered during the process, how they overcame them and what role they believe all students should play in the re-invention of higher education.
Going to college requires that students make decisions within a complicated bureaucratic system. This system, which is the only route by which a student can journey from application to graduation, is, for the most part, built to serve institutional policies that reflect administrative goals and operational realities rather than student needs and demands. Students adept at navigating this system fare better than those less prepared. Missteps in navigating the system can cause more than inconvenience: in some cases, missteps can trigger serious academic setbacks that jeopardize both their ability to graduate and their workforce opportunities.
What students like most about their school varies among the types of learning and systems of support. Hands-on learning is mentioned frquently however as being more gratifying and engaging in comparison to traditional learning out of a textbook. Students enjoy directly applying what they learned to something they can see and interact with directly.
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.
To be truly "student-centered" requires a deep understanding of the student experience. In this short video, Rhode Island students share reasons why they go to school in the first place - from their desire to succeed, to becoming role models for others, to setting themselves up for a better life. Their insights should catalyze all schools to question their own student-centricity and begin to grapple with long-held value systems.
Call this insightful foreshadowing: 2012 will be the year students and families earnestly ponder the question of whether a college-degree is worth it. We had an opportunity to spend some time with Dale Stephens at BIF's annual innovation summit. Dale is a Thiel Scholarship recipient - the program that launched in April by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who offered a couple dozen students scholarships to drop out of college and put their entrepreneurial skills to work. Dale's plan? He created "UnCollege," where students direct their own learning, seek out their own mentors, and "hack their education" in a way that personally suits them. Sound interesting? Watch the video.
What happens when a group of Rhode Island students, ages 13 - 22, are asked what fixes, big and small, they would like to see at their school? Watch this video to find out.
Integrating the student voice into the innovation in education conversation is often tokenistic. It seems to be more about students being seen to be involved rather than being active partners in change. But not at Utah State University. Check out what happens when students lead the charge to re-imagine the student experience.
The strongest support webs are innovative, highly personal mechanisms that allow students to navigate a seemingly impossible pipeline. We find existing resources are often adapted to suit the need, desire or specific-goal of the student.
We’re finding a big difference in engagement and persistence between students encouraged to “engage in college going behavior” and those encouraged to become decision makers and long-term planners. Unfortunately, far too many students don’t understand how to make their college experience meaningful or helpful to them in the short or long term. And this has profound impact on student success during and after college.
“The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” -Victor Hugo. This profound insight was delivered to us by Shaun Robinson, a Northeastern Law student who shared his story at the BIF-7 Collaborative Innovation Summit in October, 2011. We share this through The Insight Engine because Shaun is a role model, a catalyst, a transformation artist for us all, no matter your age or circumstance. Interested in behavior change? Watch Shaun's video story.
We value your feedback. Please leave us a message.