Designing Student Support Around Student Needs, Not Institutional Structures

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For 25 years, Page Keller worked in academic affairs, leading student success, learning assistance, first- and second-year experience, and peer education programs. Throughout her career, she kept coming back to the same question: How do we create the conditions that help more students succeed?

Today, Keller works with colleges and universities across the country as Vice President of Academic Relations at Knack Tutoring. Looking across hundreds of campuses, she started noticing a pattern she never could have seen while working inside just one institution: “We often ask students to adapt to systems that were designed for a very different student population.”

In this episode of Next Practices, Keller argues that when students don’t use support services, the problem often isn’t motivation. It’s that the support doesn’t fit the way many students live today. Students are working jobs, commuting to campus, and caring for family members while trying to earn a degree. Yet many of the systems meant to support them were built for a full-time, residential student.

That’s why the institutions making the biggest changes aren’t asking how to get more students to use existing programs. They’re asking a different question: If we were designing student support for today’s students, what would it look like?

Why Student Support Doesn’t Always Reach the Students Who Need It

When Keller worked on campus, her focus was improving the programs already in place. Today, she works with colleges and universities across the country, and she sees the same challenges almost everywhere: student engagement, retention, belonging, academic support, and reaching students who are balancing work, commuting, and family responsibilities.

That broader perspective changed how she thinks about the problem. When students don’t use support services, it’s easy to assume they aren’t motivated or engaged. But when the same pattern shows up on hundreds of campuses, Keller believes the problem isn’t the students. It’s the way many support systems are designed.

“Instead of asking, ‘Why aren’t students using what we’ve built?’ we should be asking, ‘Have we built something that actually works for the students we have today?'”

That shift changes everything. Once you see the challenge as a design problem instead of a student problem, different solutions start to emerge.

Building Supports Around Today’s Students

Keller draws a clear distinction between improving an existing system and rethinking it altogether.

Incremental change makes the current model a little more flexible. It extends office hours, adds an online option, or launches another program. Those changes can help, but they don’t change the way student support is organized.

Redesign starts somewhere else. It asks what student support would look like if it were built around today’s students from the beginning. That means thinking about when students need help, where they need it, how quickly they can access it, and whether navigating support feels straightforward or confusing.

In that context, flexibility isn’t just offering evening hours or another online service. It’s removing friction by making support part of the student experience instead of something students have to seek out after they’ve already fallen behind.

Keller is quick to point out that this kind of redesign is still uncommon. Higher education is built on long-established systems, and institutions are under pressure to improve outcomes with limited time and resources. Making small improvements often feels like the safer path.

The campuses that stand out, though, are stepping back to ask a bigger question: Does the way we’ve organized student support still make sense for the students we serve today?

Finding the Friction Behind Student Stop-Outs

When students stop out, transfer, or disengage, it’s easy to focus on the outcome. Keller believes the more important question is what happened before it.

Students don’t leave for a single reason. Often, they run into a series of small barriers that make getting help harder than it should be. A learning center closes before they finish work. The only tutor for a course is available during class. Support exists, but not when students actually need it.

Data can point you toward the problem, but it rarely explains it. Keller encourages leaders to go beyond surveys and talk directly with students about what it feels like to navigate their institution. 

Where did they get stuck? 

What made asking for help difficult? 

What almost caused them to give up?

Those conversations often reveal problems that dashboards never will.

Keller also pushes back on the idea that redesign has to be a years-long effort. She describes it as using both a microscope and a telescope. Keep working toward long-term structural change while fixing the friction students experience today.

Peer Learning Beyond Tutoring

If student support were designed around the way students live today, Keller believes peer learning would play a much bigger role. The catch is that institutions have to stop thinking of it as something only struggling students need.

Working with Dr. George Kuh, Knack’s senior advisor and the scholar behind the concept of high-impact practices, Keller has seen how educationally purposeful peer interactions benefit everyone involved. Peer tutors, mentors, and supplemental instruction leaders strengthen their own communication, leadership, and subject knowledge. Students receiving support get more than help with a course. They build a connection with another person on campus.

That connection can go much further than a single tutoring session. A peer tutor might encourage a student to visit office hours. That conversation with a professor can lead to another connection, and then another. As Keller puts it:

“Make that one connection with that one peer… and you don’t have any idea just how far that ripple will go.”

That’s why Keller sees peer learning as more than tutoring or supplemental instruction. It can become part of how an institution builds belonging, supports learning, and helps students stay connected from the start—not just after they’re already struggling.

One Place to Start

Keller’s advice for provosts and vice presidents of student affairs is simple: pick one part of the student experience and go through it exactly the way a student would. Don’t start with a process map or an organizational chart. Just follow the path a student has to take.

Imagine you’re a first-year student who realizes at 9 p.m. that you’re struggling in chemistry. Can you figure out where to get help? Can you schedule it? What happens if you’re working or in class when support is available?

Then ask students to walk you through the same experience. The goal isn’t to redesign everything overnight. It’s to find one place where getting help is harder than it needs to be—and fix it.

As Keller puts it: “The goal is not to offer more resources. Most institutions already offer a ton of resources. The goal is to create an environment where students can actually access and benefit from those resources in ways that fit their lives.”

Student success isn’t just about offering support. It’s about making sure students can actually use it.

Links & Resources:

• Page Keller (LinkedIn)
• Knack Tutoring
• High-Impact Practices