Key points:
- Student housing offers a direct window into student well-being
- How campus shapes the way students work
- The hidden link between AI strategy and student retention
- For more news on retention, visit eCN’s Campus Leadership hub
Ask any university president how they can improve visibility into student well-being and satisfaction, and housing may not come up at all, yet housing teams have insight into some of the earliest and most robust signals of student risk and satisfaction anywhere on or off campus. At the same time, those teams are grappling with more operational complexity than ever, limited staff, and data gaps such as those that occur when students transition off campus.
A recent industry survey makes it clear that leading institutions are solving both of these problems at once by treating housing as a core part of their retention strategy and giving their teams tools to maximize work and integrate new streams of useful data.
How can others follow their lead?
Common obstacles to success
Along with best practices to follow, the survey results reveal common missteps to avoid, with one of the biggest being neglecting student housing as a window into student well-being. Industry research shows that where students live has a profound effect on their academic experience, and the overwhelming majority of institutions in this latest survey (88%) believe that earlier visibility into student wellbeing and engagement would improve outcomes.
Yet only 23% currently use automated alerts or dashboards in their housing platforms to flag high-risk students, and 56% are still relying on manual review and word-of-mouth communication between staff. This results in delays and invisible flaws; a wealth of information goes unnoticed or is noticed too late to give students the support they need.
Compounding these technical difficulties, the teams responsible for housing operations tend to be some of the leanest. Nearly half of institutions operate their entire housing function with 10 or fewer professional staff. In other words, many institutions are asking shrinking teams to notice more, with less infrastructure.
Elsewhere, visibility into a student’s well-being can be better, but staff awareness and communication gaps remain. Seventy-four percent of institutions say they measure well-being through resident conduct and incident tracking, for example. That number represents a remarkable amount of real information, but it’s often scattered across multiple systems within the higher ed landscape. Unlocking it, however, requires a streamlined, integrated communications system that many teams don’t yet have.
Perhaps the biggest opportunity lies off campus. The impact a residential experience has on well-being doesn’t end when a student moves into a neighborhood apartment. Eighty-three percent of institutions report having little or no visibility into a student’s residential experience once they move off campus, even though 71% of those same institutions say the off-campus transition has a moderate or significant impact on student success. The industry knows this inflection point matters, but traditional systems and tools do not allow for that sustained visibility.
Shifting toward a better approach
The survey findings offer several ways to overcome these obstacles, and each one builds off the others:
Treat resident data as an early-warning system as well as a satisfaction metric. Resident feedback, queries, and behavior patterns reveal a wide variety of insights that can guide housing initiatives, show emerging problems, and fine-tune retention strategies to fit the unique environments in which they play out.
Fund belonging, not just beds. When institutions are asked which residence life initiatives move the needle most on retention, resident assistant engagement (77%) and social programming (76%) make the top of the list, ahead of nearly everything else the survey measured. Belonging is one of the most reliable retention levers we have, and it deserves a budget line to match.
Reconsider what information falls under the purview of a housing department. If the only numbers a housing leader hears about are occupancy and revenue, that’s the only story they will absorb and act on. Measures like persistence, well-being referral rates, and time-to-intervention should be connected to housing because they fall under the influence of housing operations.
Extend the strategy beyond move-out. Students living off campus are still your students. Sixty-three percent of students report that housing stress affects their academic performance or mental health at least sometimes, and that risk doesn’t disappear when a student stops living in an institution-owned building. It just becomes harder to see.
Finally, give housing leaders a seat at the student-success table. The people running residence life have more real-time insight into the student experience than most realize.
Institutions that are serious about retention, well-being, and student success place housing high on their priority list, and position it to be leveraged. When the necessary tools and data are readily available, housing teams are equipped to help with exponentially more than just heads in beds.
Jason Day is the CEO of StarRez.
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