In our Traci's Take series, Our resident student success guru, Traci Steehler, gives her unfiltered and practical take on the latest in student engagement and success. This spring, she's breaking down NASPA's 2025 Top Issues in Student Affairs Follow-Up Brief: Student Success. Point by point, she'll pull from decades of experience to share how you can apply NASPA's findings to serve your institution.
“Almost two thirds of VPSAs ranked increasing institution-wide collaboration to deliver coordinated student success support as a very important issue to their institution in 2025.” (NASPA)
Next strategy for Student Affairs professionals to consider: “Map the flow of work and responsibilities and use student journey mapping tools across advising, financial aid, academic support, and career services to streamline processes and avoid duplication.” (NASPA)
Traci’s thoughts:
Most institutions already have a roadmap for students, one that they might even consider successful. Schools often have an advising roadmap, a financial aid checklist, a first-year experience guide, and career readiness milestones.
The problem? Students don’t experience college in siloed departments. They experience it as one single journey. When every office operates from its own version of a roadmap, the student experience is fragmented and overwhelming.
That’s why this strategy from NASPA matters so much.
Journey mapping is not just an operational exercise. It’s one of the clearest opportunities Student Affairs has to lead institutional transformation, and it starts by centering the student.
So what does “journey mapping” actually mean in today’s tech forward higher ed landscape?
Historically, campuses have mapped the student journey from the institution’s perspective, focusing on deadlines, milestones, forms, and compliance.
Students experience college very differently.
They experience confusion when systems don’t connect. They experience stress when they miss a milestone and don’t know how to recover, or don’t know where they went wrong. They experience uncertainty when they change majors or career paths and suddenly feel like they’ve fallen off track. They experience belonging (or isolation) in the small moments institutions may overlook.
Real journey mapping flips the lens from institutional process to student experience. It’s the process of visually charting every touchpoint a student has with the institution from enrollment through graduation, including the moments where they feel stuck, disconnected, motivated, encouraged, or overwhelmed (so that we can build-in helpful redirects without students experiencing these moments as individual failures).
When institutions start mapping the student experience honestly, they usually uncover the same issue: Too many systems are working independently while expecting students to somehow piece everything together on their own.
NASPA’s brief reinforces something Student Affairs leaders already know: siloed student support models are becoming unsustainable. When advising, financial aid, academic support, career services, and co-curricular engagement all operate separately, students often receive communication that feels disconnected, duplicative, and conflicting.
This is where the shift from a static checklist to a true ecosystem happens.
When we map the flow of work, we also need to examine the hand-offs between departments. Bringing together Student Affairs, Advising, Career-Services, and more into the same room and asking: “where does my work end and your work begin?” helps to clarify boundaries and eliminate friction points, and eliminates a student asking the same question three times to three different offices. We help ensure that information flows between departments and the student only has to tell their story once.
Currently, staff spend enormous amounts of time manually coordinating work that technology should automatically support. This is where Student Affairs is uniquely positioned to lead.
Student Affairs professionals sit closest to the true student experience. They understand that student success is rarely just about academics. A student struggling in class may also be dealing with financial stress, lack of belonging, career uncertainty, or low engagement outside the classroom. Those experiences are interconnected whether institutional systems recognize it or not.
For this reason, one-dimensional roadmaps no longer work. A modern student journey should be more like a GPS – interactive and responsive to twists and turns.
When students miss a milestone or change direction, the system should adapt alongside them, rerouting in real time instead of making students feel like they failed because they deviated from the original plan.
Technology can either reinforce silos or finally help break them down.The goal isn’t to add more platforms or overwhelm students with more notifications. The goal is to create interconnected, living pathways that help departments work together while making the student experience feel simpler, more streamlined and more supportive.
This is exactly where a platform like Suitable comes in. Suitable tracks and gamifies the co-curricular engagement that often goes unseen, ensuring those impactful, small interactions are captured as part of a student’s success story.
With Suitable, institutions can design flexible pathways that go beyond rigid, compliance driven checklists. These pathways are a tool for meaning-making and competency development, giving students the agency to understand why their experiences matter.
Today’s students expect experiences that feel personalized, responsive, and interactive. They are used to technology that adapts to them everywhere else in their lives. Higher education can’t continue handing students static documents and expecting them to independently navigate institutional complexity alone.
An important note: This isn’t about replacing human connection with technology.
It’s about allowing systems to handle the reroutes so staff can focus on the work that matters most – building relationships, supporting students, and creating affirming experiences that help students persist.
Student Affairs doesn’t just belong in these conversations.They should be leading them. By centering the student experience, we don’t only improve journey mapping – we elevate every facet of the student experience.
Join us for the next breakdown as we explore how institutions can better integrate career readiness into co-curricular experiences.