We Keep Rebuilding the Engine While the Driver’s Seat Is on Fire

Higher education has spent the last decade focusing heavily on technology modernization. But modernization and experience are not the same thing.

Walk into any strategic planning session at a university, and you’ll hear the same conversation: ERP modernization, cloud migration, system consolidation, and digital transformation roadmaps. You’ll hear about tens of millions of dollars, multi-year implementation timelines, and change management consultants. The ambition is real. The investment is real.

And yet, a first-generation student sitting in a financial aid portal at 11 p.m., trying to figure out why her disbursement is on hold, is navigating something that looks and feels like it was designed in 2004. That is because it was.

That’s the gap nobody wants to talk about.

We’ve confused infrastructure investment with student investment.

I get why institutions focus on the back end. ERPs are genuinely painful. Legacy systems create operational risk. IT teams are managing technical debt that keeps them up at night. These are real problems worth solving.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: the student never sees the ERP. They see the portal. The form. The three-step process that should be one step. The error message that tells them nothing. The email that says “please contact your advisor” when the advisor’s calendar is booked two weeks out.

The experience layer is where the mission either lands or doesn’t. And it’s chronically underfunded, under-researched, and under-prioritized compared to the systems that sit behind it.

The ROI math is actually obvious once you look at it.

Improving user experience doesn’t require replacing your ERP. It doesn’t require a core administrative system at all, most of the time. It requires listening, actually sitting with students and staff, watching them use the tools, asking where things break down, and then fixing what you find.

That’s not a multimillion-dollar project. In many cases, it’s a fraction of that cost and can deliver results in a semester, not three years.

Think about the yield impact of a better admissions portal experience, the retention signal from a student who can actually navigate financial aid without calling the help desk four times, and the staff hours recovered when an advising workflow stops requiring seventeen clicks. These numbers are calculable. Most institutions just haven’t calculated them.

There’s also something institutions rarely say out loud: the experience tells students what you think of them.

When a student encounters a broken, confusing, outdated digital experience, the message isn’t neutral. It says: we didn’t think this was worth fixing. It says: your time isn’t a priority. For students who are already wondering whether they belong, first-gen students, adult learners, and transfer students navigating new systems, that friction isn’t just annoying. It’s discouraging.

Higher ed talks a lot about belonging and access. The technology experience is part of that. You can’t build an inclusive campus on an inaccessible portal.

So, what would it look like to actually fix this?

It starts with stopping the assumption that user experience is a design problem you solve at the end of a big implementation. It’s a continuous practice. It requires dedicated resources, people whose job is to understand what students and staff actually encounter and make it better. It requires connecting UX investment to institutional outcomes in the language that budget committees understand.

And it requires recognizing that meaningful experience improvements can come from process redesign, user-centered design, workflow optimization, and targeted technology investments, not just large-scale system modernization efforts. It’s a form that asks for the same information three times. It’s a deadline buried in a policy document no student has ever read. It’s a mobile experience that was never designed for mobile. These things are fixable now, with existing systems, by people who are empowered to go fix them.

The institutions that figure this out first won’t just have happier students. They’ll have better retention numbers, lower support costs, and a brand built on an experience people actually remember positively.

That’s what “digital transformation” should mean in higher education. Not just better plumbing. A better experience for the people the whole thing is supposed to serve.

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