From outcomes to experience: Rethinking the student journey at colleges and polytechnics

A student accepts an offer to a college program while balancing part-time work and family responsibilities. They are capable, motivated, and excited. Before classes begin, they are told that some of their previous courses may qualify for transfer credit, which is exciting for the student, as it will help them move through the program faster to be able to get a job and manage household expenses. To confirm this, they are directed between admissions, academic advising, and their academic department. The information they receive is inconsistent, and it takes several weeks to get an answer.

While waiting, the student delays registering for a required course because they don't know whether the credit will be approved. By the time the decision arrives, the course is full. What began as a routine administrative question now risks disrupting the sequence of their program and delaying their progress.

The delay also begins to affect the student’s confidence. They have attempted post-secondary study before and didn't complete their program. Now, a relatively simple administrative process is making them question whether they can navigate what lies ahead. If it is this difficult to get a clear answer before classes begin, how will they manage the academic and personal demands of the program?

None of the interactions is unusual, and every team involved is trying to help. But students often encounter these processes while adapting to a new environment, balancing competing responsibilities and determining whether they belong. At those moments, seemingly small barriers can have an outsized effect. A good student experience removes obstacles while building the confidence, momentum, and belief students need to persist.

Colleges and polytechnics in Canada have become highly capable at delivering and tracking the outcomes of graduates. Employment results, employer confidence, and labour market responsiveness all, necessarily, matter. However, outcomes alone do not show what students have had to navigate to achieve success.

A student may graduate with strong employment prospects, but still have experienced unnecessary handoffs, delays, uncertainty, and confusion. These experiences matter. They affect whether students persist, stay on track, feel they belong, and whether they would choose to return. A persistent issue in student experience is that institutions often address individual parts of the student journey without treating the experience as a connected whole. Colleges and polytechnics have long focused on individual components of the journey: onboarding, advising, learning pathways, retention, work integrated learning. Many institutions can point to new pilots or added supports and services. Student experience isn’t something you bolt on to academic studies. It is integrated into everything an institution does and shaped by every interaction a student has with the institution.

We believe that institutions should focus on a specific risk that is not solved by any single service: friction in the student experience. Colleges and polytechnics should treat avoidable friction as both a student experience problem and an operating problem. Doing so requires institutions to define the experience they want students to have, identify where fragmented processes undermine it, and redesign the highest-impact parts of the journey across organizational boundaries.

Friction occurs when students struggle to access the information, decisions, or support they need, when they need them. It often shows up in three ways:

• Repeated handoffs, where students bounce between different offices asking basic questions about progression, funding, credit recognition, or placements.
• Inconsistent guidance, where different parts of the institution give different answers or apply policies different, and the student becomes the integration layer.
• Time-sensitive bottlenecks, where decisions are made on institutional timelines that do not match academic or workplace timelines, and a student loses a full term. 

Not all friction is bad. Some checks are needed to protect quality, safety, fairness, and academic integrity. The problem is avoidable friction: points in the journey where unclear ownership, inconsistent information, or slow decisions create unnecessary effort for students and preventable work for staff.

Friction is also an operating issue. Colleges and polytechnics are navigating significant financial pressures, with limited capacity to respond by continually adding services or staff. This makes it increasingly important to reduce the avoidable demand created by unclear pathways, repeated contacts, duplicated effort and manual workarounds. Addressing these sources of friction can improve the student experience while allowing institutions to make better use of existing staff capacity.

A positive student experience depends on how well an institution connects its teams, processes and systems around the student journey. Students should be able to access help easily, receive consistent guidance and move through key transition points without unnecessary barriers. When that happens, they can spend less time navigating the institution and more time focusing on their learning, work and other responsibilities.

A cohesive experience means students can reliably:

• Start without unnecessary friction, with admissions, onboarding, and first term scheduling designed for full time, part time, and apprenticeship learners.
• Progress without preventable delays, with clear information on program requirements, prerequisites, timetables, credit recognition, and advising.
• Get help without being bounced around, with clear access to the right support and a reliable answer.
• Transition between study and work without confusion, with placement, practicum, apprenticeship, and work-integrated learning requirements aligned to program expectations and student support.

Avoidable friction often emerges at the points where teams, systems, and processes intersect. This fragmentation rarely reflects a lack of care. Most institutions care deeply about student success but the responsibility for progression, support, scheduling, and work-based learning sit across multiple teams.

Each team may improve its own part of the journey, but students experience these parts as one pathway. When no one owns the connection points, students become responsible for navigating the gaps.

This is made harder by the diversity of student needs. A part-time learner, apprentice, international student, parent, or student returning after time away may need different forms of support at different points. The goal should be to create a minimum standard that holds across pathways and allows support to respond to differing needs.

To understand where the friction is a real issue, leaders can start with a few practical questions:

• Where are students being slowed, redirected, or lost because the institution is too hard to navigate?
• How many handoffs occur between offer and first assessment, and who owns the gaps?
• How many steps are required to resolve common issues in student services?
• Can a part-time learner and an apprentice get consistent answers about progression without multiple referrals?
• Which processes routinely delay progression by a full term, and what is driving those delays?

Once friction for students is visible, institutions can act in targeted ways:

1. Define the target student experience and where friction matters most. Leaders should be clear about the experience they want students to have, which groups are most affected by friction, and which points in the journey create the greatest risk to progression, confidence, or retention. This gives academic, service and digital teams a shared basis for action.
2. Map processes and use existing digital tools to limit handoffs and mixed messages. Develop focused process maps to identify unnecessary steps, unclear ownership, repeated handoffs and conflicting information. Institutions can then use existing portals, learning platforms, case-management tools and service workflows more effectively to give students a clearer route to support and more consistent answers. Targeted improvements can reduce repeat contacts, shorten delays, and prevent students from being passed unnecessarily between teams.
3. Use data to diagnose disruptors to the student journey. The biggest experience hit often comes from preventable bottlenecks that cost a full term, especially in sequenced programs, apprenticeships, or placements. Pick the two processes that create the most impact in retention in completion and redesign them end-to-end.
4. Reimagine the operating model. The most ambitious option is to make the student experience work as one system, by linking academic delivery, student services and digital support into a seamless front-end experience. For example, some institutions adopt a ‘one-stop-shop’ model where students can go to one location or digital platform to answer their questions, access services, or begin to process for resolving any issues they have.

Institutional success is more than just bringing students in. It also is not reducible to what happens after a student leaves, in the form of employment outcomes. Success depends on what happens when students are inside the system. Can the institution carry students through their training and education, without transferring complexity onto them?

In a constrained environment, improving student experience cannot depend only on adding more services or more staff. Institutions also need to reduce the avoidable demand, repeated effort and progression risks created by fragmented processes. Done well, this can strengthen student confidence and outcomes while protecting staff capacity and making better use of institutional resources.

A strong student experience doesn't mean removing every challenge. It means ensuring that institutional complexity does not become an unnecessary barrier to learning, progression and future opportunity.

Get in touch to discuss how your institution can reduce avoidable friction and create a more connected student experience.

Connect with Nathalie Mejia, Michael Tremblay, and Tyrone Collins on LinkedIn.