Editor’s note: The following article draws on a discussion from The EvoLLLution Symposium featuring Devin Purgason, Vince Miller and Leslie Webb. Rather than serving as a transcript of the session, this article synthesizes the key themes, perspectives and ideas the conversation explored.
For years, higher education has measured student success through a familiar set of metrics: retention, persistence and graduation. While those indicators remain important, they no longer tell the full story of today’s learner.
Student populations have become more diverse, and earner pathways have become less linear. More students are balancing employment, family responsibilities and financial pressures while pursuing their education. Others stop out, return years later or move between credentials as their careers evolve. As those realities continue to reshape higher education, institutions are being challenged to ask a different question: Are we still measuring the right things?
That question sat at the center of a recent discussion among higher education leaders exploring the evolving relationship between engagement, belonging and student success. Rather than questioning the importance of traditional outcomes, the conversation focused on how institutions can better understand the experiences that ultimately lead to those outcomes.
Student Success Extends Beyond Graduation
One of the strongest themes throughout the discussion was that graduation, while still an essential outcome, should not be viewed as the only definition of student success. For many institutions, particularly those serving working adults and community college learners, success often happens long before a diploma is awarded. Completing a short-term credential, returning after time away, securing employment in a chosen field or reaching a personal milestone can all represent meaningful progress along a learner’s journey.
That broader perspective reflects a shift in how many institutions are beginning to think about learner success. Rather than focusing solely on a finish line, there is growing recognition that institutions should celebrate—and intentionally support—the many steps that help learners continue moving forward.
This shift also changes the kinds of questions institutional leaders need to ask. Instead of focusing exclusively on whether students graduate within a particular timeframe, they must also understand whether students are building momentum, overcoming barriers and seeing value throughout their educational experience.
Belonging Is Built Through Everyday Experiences
The conversation also challenged a common assumption about belonging. When people think about student belonging, they often picture residence halls, student organizations, athletic events or large campus traditions. While those experiences certainly matter for many learners, they don’t reflect the reality of every student population.
For commuter students, adult learners and those balancing education alongside work and family responsibilities, belonging is often created through much smaller moments. It may be an advisor who remembers a student’s name. It may be receiving a timely answer to an important question. It may be completing an onboarding process that leaves a learner feeling confident about what comes next.
Those experiences may not appear in a student engagement report, but they often shape whether a learner feels connected to an institution. Perhaps more importantly, they illustrate that belonging cannot simply be assigned to student affairs or viewed as another program to implement. Instead, it must be intentionally designed into the learner experience from the very first interaction onward.
Data Should Deepen Understanding, Not Simply Measure Activity
As institutions invest more heavily in analytics and student engagement technologies, another important distinction emerged throughout the discussion: Measuring participation is not the same as understanding impact. Attendance numbers, event participation and engagement metrics provide useful information, but they rarely explain why students are succeeding or struggling.
Panelists described the growing need to connect multiple sources of information, from advising interactions and early alerts to chatbot conversations and student feedback, to better understand where learners encounter friction throughout their journey.
Some of the most valuable insights may come from places institutions have not traditionally viewed as data sources. Questions asked after business hours, repeated requests for clarification or patterns emerging across student support interactions can all reveal barriers that formal surveys or participation counts might never capture. The challenge, then, is not simply collecting more data. It is using that information to better understand learners and respond in meaningful ways.
Student Success Belongs to the Entire Institution
Perhaps the most consistent message throughout the conversation was that student success cannot belong to a single office. Students do not experience marketing, enrollment, financial aid, academic affairs and student affairs as separate departments. They experience one institution.
Every interaction either reinforces or weakens their confidence that they made the right decision. That means improving student success requires far greater alignment across the institution than many traditional organizational structures encourage.
Marketing influences expectations before a student ever applies. Enrollment shapes the transition into the institution. Academic affairs influences learning and progression. Student affairs helps create connection and community. Technology, advising and support services remove—or unintentionally create—barriers along the way.
When those areas operate independently, learners experience the gaps. When they work together, institutions create experiences that feel coordinated, supportive and intentional.
A Broader Definition Creates Broader Opportunities
The discussion ultimately suggested that higher education does not need to abandon traditional measures of student success. Graduation, persistence and retention remain essential indicators of institutional effectiveness. What is changing is the recognition that those outcomes are often the result of countless experiences that occur long before commencement. Institutions that continue measuring only the destination may miss important opportunities to improve the journey itself.
As learner populations continue to evolve, success will increasingly depend on an institution’s ability to create environments where students feel connected, supported and able to make steady progress toward their goals—whatever path those goals ultimately take.
The question is no longer simply whether students succeed. It is whether institutions are creating the conditions that make success possible.