The Shift from Student Services to Student Success Systems

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When Dr. Michelle Nelson describes her work at Macomb County Community College, she doesn’t call it student services. She calls it building a system.

“My job is to help close equity gaps and help students thrive in their experience at the college,” she says. But what that looks like in practice goes well beyond individual programs or departments. It means creating an institution-wide ecosystem — one where advisors, faculty, and student success staff are all working from the same playbook, looking at the same signals, and moving toward the same outcome.

Dr. Nelson is the Dean of Student Success at Macomb County Community College in Michigan. She’s a native Detroiter, the first in her family to earn a PhD, and she brings more than two decades of experience across academic and student affairs. In this episode of Next Practices, she breaks down what the shift from reactive to proactive support actually looks like on a 27,000-student campus — and why it starts with a question most institutions aren’t asking: Are we ready for our students?

What Is the Hidden Curriculum in Higher Education?

Many students—especially first-generation and adult learners—navigate college without a clear understanding of the rules. The expectations, processes, and unwritten norms that shape success are often left unexplained.

Dr. Nelson calls this the hidden curriculum: the unwritten expectations around degree plans, course sequencing, credit hours, and academic standing that become traps for students who don’t have a family member to decode them. At Macomb, her team works to surface those rules proactively — before a student falls into academic notice wondering why no one told them what it meant.

“It is not their fault they’re getting caught in the trap of our bureaucratic loop of college,” she says. “We have to get in front of those indicators.”

That means moving from lagging signals — a failed class, a missed deadline — to leading ones: attendance patterns, quiz performance, and course combinations that historically predict struggle. Used effectively, those insights help institutions intervene while there is still time to make a difference.

How Should Colleges Use Student Data to Support Retention?

At an institution of more than 27,000 students, no team can personally check in with everyone. That’s exactly why data infrastructure matters — it provides teams visibility across thousands of students so the right conversations happen at the right time.

“Data tells us who needs support,” Dr. Nelson says. “It’s the relationship that actually changes the outcome.”

Before anyone on her team reaches out, they review a student’s full history: past conversations, academic notes, what brought the student in before. The goal is for the student to feel recognized, not processed. That kind of personalized touch point builds the trust that makes students willing to ask for help before things get critical.

The same logic applies to how Macomb redesigned its academic alert process. In the past, a faculty alert triggered an automated email from the dean’s office — generic, impersonal, easy to ignore. Now, the outreach comes back from the faculty member who raised the flag. Same information, different relationship. The result: more students open the message, more students show up to tutoring, and faculty feel like genuine partners in the work.

Why Faculty Engagement Is Essential to Student Retention

One of the most persistent gaps in student success infrastructure is the wall between student services and academic affairs. Faculty see students multiple times a week. They get the calls when something’s wrong at home. They notice when someone who was engaged goes quiet. But at many institutions, that information never makes it to the people positioned to help.

At Macomb, Dr. Nelson’s team has worked to close that gap deliberately — making it easy for faculty to raise concerns, ensuring those concerns get a real response, and building enough cross-functional trust that faculty feel like stakeholders in retention outcomes, not just reporters.

“Without the other,” she says, “students are the ones that could be the casualty.”

What Does a Proactive Student Success System Actually Look Like?

Dr. Nelson closes with a line that captures the philosophy behind everything her team does: Support isn’t extra. It’s strategy.

That philosophy has a name in higher education. Becoming a Student-Ready College makes the case that institutions — not students — need to do the work of readiness. Dr. Nelson’s team read it together, and she says it was transformative precisely because everyone saw themselves in it. Not as observers, but as participants in a shared challenge: what systems can we improve or eliminate to reduce barriers for our students?

That question is what separates a student success office from a student success system. One responds to need. The other is designed to anticipate it.

That means celebrating a gateway course passed. Acknowledging a student who juggled work, kids, and chemistry this semester. Building checkpoints that reinforce to students — who may have never seen anyone in their family finish a degree — that they are on the right path, they belong in this program, and someone is watching their back.

“When students know there’s someone as part of their village,” she says, “whether they raised their hand or not — that’s when you create the momentum that carries them through.”

Want to see how institutions build the coordinated systems that make this kind of work possible? Explore the Student Success Playbook 

Links & Resources:

• Dr. Michelle Nelson – Macomb Community College
• Michelle (Cade) Nelson Ph.D. – LinkedIn
• Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success
• Macomb Community College Student Success Resources