Improve Student Experience Across Six Core Domains to Meet Emerging Student Expectations

Improving your university’s total student experience must begin with an honest assessment of current performance. EAB’s experience working with nearly every type of higher education institution to improve student and institutional outcomes has led to a wealth of experience and insight on this topic across diverse operational and demographic settings.

From our work, we have identified six aspects of the total student experience, detailed below.

Enrolment

Marketing, recruitment, and prospective interactions that set ‘customer’ expectations before students arrive on campus

Administrative

Institutional processes, physical and digital estates, and systems that create the structure for delivering student support and fulfilling the teaching and learning mission

Social

Student clubs, athletics, student-to-student interactions, and relationships that contribute to student happiness and sense of belonging at the institution

Academic

Teaching and learning, assessment, and classroom activities that contribute to positive learning outcomes

Well-Being

Support staff, resources, and health services that attend to students’ personal needs and general well-being across mental, physical, and financial dimensions

Career

Skill acquisition, employment partnerships, placements, and internships that support and prepare students for the workplace

EAB’s total student experience diagnostic is comprised of 18 questions; three inquiries per aspect of the total student experience and outlined above.

There are three ways in which you can complete this diagnostic:

1. Complete the diagnostic on behalf of your campus. Share your diagnostic results with campus stakeholders and student experience committees to kick-off prioritisation conversations and highlight areas of strength, weakness, and opportunity.
2. Convene stakeholders on your campus to walk through each of the elements that make up a student’s total university experience. Determine ratings for your campus’s level of performance for each statement based on general consensus. Use the results to launch new student experience initiatives.
3. Share this page by clicking “Share” on the upper right-hand corner of this page, or download a copy of the PDF diagnostic to distribute with stakeholders on your campus to complete. Collate completed diagnostics and average the ratings onto this digital diagnostic. Make note of major discrepancies in ratings across campus units or stakeholders for follow-up during committee-level meetings.

Please download the PDF version of the diagnostic and email your completed version to our experts. They will compile the most appropriate resources, based on your diagnostic results.