Putting the Student Voice at the Center: Lab Debuts Student Experience Map

Melissa Withers
October 13, 2009

The Business Innovation Factory's Student Experience Lab was launched to create a place where innovators can understand the student experience and experiment with new solutions. The Lab launched with an initial effort to map the current experience of college students and identify opportunities for significantly enhancing the student experience.

On October 7, the Lab team released a first draft map of the current college student experience.  This interactive "experience map" is based on research and interviews with students from all walks of life and at different stages of their academic career. We have captured their story using video, audio, photography and narrative as a first step towards revealing the human, environmental and systems-level factors that have the most significant impact on student success.

After speaking with students at more than 40 schools from across the country, we gathered thousands of data points related to student’s experience with academic, personal and financial components of the higher education system. While every student experience is in many ways unique, we identified nine experiential themes that tracked across demographics, geography and school and student-type. You can explore these themes by navigating across the experience map.

Students are telling us loud and clear: the system is broken. Students are making decisions with tragically little information about their options or the long-term consequences of their choices. Students are maxing out on debt and uncertain how to turn their dreams into a fulfilling career. And, schools are struggling to deliver affordable services that meet demand. To educate Americans at the scale and speed which we need, we must aggressively explore and experiment with new solutions that enable more students to get the education they need.

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