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The travel industry has long been a commodity business: get me from Point A to Point B and have a bed waiting at the hotel. The “experience” of travel was something that you paid more for.

But in the last decade or so, the rise of social media and the fragmentation of the media—where there isn’t just a handful of travel magazines or the travel section in the Sunday newspaper but now thousands of newsletters and websites dedicated to travel—means that everyone wants the curated experience they see or read about.

The result is that the travel industry is under pressure to create in-person “wow” experiences that replicate what we see online. Airlines, hotels, resorts, even entire cities now need to differentiate themselves beyond the commodity of just “getting you there” (which was Delta’s tagline in the 1980s).

“If I see a video of a chef preparing dinner on Instagram or a photo of that perfect waterfall, I’ll expect the same when I arrive,” Craig Billings, the CEO of Wynn Resorts, said during a panel at the Milken Global Institute in Los Angeles last week.

I was at the Milken conference to lead a panel on the future of higher ed (you can watch that one here). In many ways, the higher ed industry has become the travel industry of yesteryear: a commodity. Even among top colleges, they all seem the same to many students after you sort them by location or size. It’s more a matter of which one they can get into.

And among the vast majority of colleges, what the decision often comes down to for families is money. Colleges try to differentiate themselves, but even those efforts, whether it’s amenities (we have a climbing wall!) or marketing (90%+ of our grads get a job!) increasingly seem like a commodity in a marketplace crowded with such things.

Higher ed is now following other industries, including travel, in putting a focus on the customer experience (or the student experience, in the case of colleges).

Some of that “experience” is what I’d call a marketing façade, largely driven through social media, where undergraduates show off what it’s like to live, learn, and mainly have fun on campus—with much of it from student creators and a little of it shaped by the university itself. It’s why I’d argue that large Southern universities, in particular, have seen their applications rise in recent years because of TikTok videos from packed football games and sorority parties that make college seem like fun compared to online learning during the pandemic.

But much of the effort on enriching the student experience goes deeper than curated photo shoots. It’s about improving the day-to-day interactions that students have with anyone and everyone on campus—an outgrowth of the student success movement of the last two decades.

Last month, at the ASU-GSV Summit in San Diego, which brought together more than 7,000 entrepreneurs, educators, and ed-tech companies, the term “student success” was supplanted by the phrase “student experience” in nearly a dozen sessions that I counted.

“Students may be successful, they may get great jobs, but if they don’t enjoy their experiences in college, then it doesn’t come back to the institution in terms of lifelong learning, alumni participation, or philanthropic dollars,” Raj Echambadi, the president of the Illinois Institute of Technology, said on the panel I led around the student experience. “You can win the battle on student success, but lose the war on the student experience.”

Like many colleges, the Illinois Institute of Technology has collected data on students and their interactions and coursework for more than a decade. But on many campuses this information remains stuck in a data warehouse somewhere. Higher education still tends to prioritize intuition and experience over data. Too often campus decisions are based on anecdotes and the gut instincts of administrators, staff, and faculty.

At Illinois Tech, the data led officials to build a platform they call Elevate, which mandates certain experiential learning opportunities (including virtual internships in high school), as well as gives students a peer mentor, an academic mentor, and an alumni coach.

The platform allows Illinois Tech to employ what the president called three critical pieces of the student experience: (1) utilizing data, (2) making one person ultimately accountable for a seamless student experience, and (3) connecting technology to a network of humans that leads to “productive outcomes.”

Thinking about the student experience in this holistic way also creates an important feedback loop for learners, Sarah Toms, the chief learning innovation officer at the IMD business school said during our ASU-GSV panel last month.

“Within 24 hours, 80% of information delivered in a lecture is gone, unless you give the opportunity to those learners to practice it,” said Toms, who is co-author of The Customer Centricity Playbook: Implement a Winning Strategy Driven by Customer Lifetime Value.

“We’re all living in this world where we’re shedding and building on skills,” Toms added, “and one of the best ways to do that is by having lots of opportunities to practice, practice, practice as you’re going through this educational experience.”

The lecture won’t die just like the commodity piece of travel remains. But by focusing more on the customer experience and less on just giving you a seat on a plane or a bed in a hotel, travel brands and lots of locales around the world have boosted consumer demand.

At a time when higher ed is shedding students, a focus on the end-to-end student experience can also boost demand and differentiate colleges in a crowded marketplace where prestige and price tend to drive a lot of the conversation right now.

🖥️ The “Next Office Hour” in May and June will focus on the student experience.

🗓️ First up on Wednesday, May 31 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT., we’ll explore how colleges and universities can take their student success efforts to the next level.

Joining me will be:

• Katy Redd, Longhorn Wellness Center at the University of Texas at Austin
• Tom Andriola, Chief Digital Officer, University of California at Irvine
• Tim Renick, National Institute for Student Success
• Sarah Toms, chief learning innovation officer, IMD 

🗓️ Then on Tuesday, June 20 at2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT. we’ll explore the results of a comprehensive survey of 2,400 college students about what they want out of the campus experience—from admissions to mental health to job readiness. 

More details to come soon, but reserve your spot now to join in an interactive discussion and get an on-demand recording. 

►Register for free here(Support from Qualtrics)

The Latest on Learning Loss

The learning loss from the pandemic is only beginning to come into full view. And given students from the pandemic will be going to college through the early 2030s, we might not know for a while about its full extent.

What’s happening: During a panel discussion at the ASU-GSV conference, Tom Kane called the learning loss from the pandemic “stunning.” Kane is faculty director at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard. He teamed up with Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project to develop the Education Recovery Scorecard, the first comparable view of district-level learning loss during the pandemic.

• In Richmond schools the math loss was equivalent to 2 years, Kane said.

By the numbers: The chair of the math department at a top-ranked institution told me that enrollment in pre-calculus has “exploded.”

• Enrollment on this campus in pre-calc in the fall of 2019 was just 37 students. Last fall, it grew to 140.
• What’s more, performance in the first exam also deteriorated. The median score in the fall of 2018, when 56 students took the first exam, was a 97. Last fall, 138 students took the first exam and the median sore was a 73.
• Most of the majors at this institution require advanced math. “You can’t hide in the curriculum on campus if you can’t do calculus,” the head of the math department told me.

In the news: School districts nationwide are quickly adopting 4-day school weeks as they seek to cut costs and fill teacher vacancies, according to Axios.

• Nationally, 850 school districts have dropped a fifth day of instruction, an increase from 650 districts in 2019.
• This is happening although studies have found lower math and English/language arts achievement in the 4-day schedule and higher absenteeism and lower graduation rates.
• A RAND Corp. study found “only weak support” for the reasons that districts typically adopt a 4-day schedule: saving money, reducing student absences, and attracting and retaining teachers.

The bottom line: When I talk to academic leaders and faculty members at colleges, most are focused on helping students on campus now, and they seem to think the situation will improve itself in the next year or two. There is no long-term plan for ensuring student success for those who went online during the pandemic—including those who were in elementary school in 2020.

👉 Read more: An op-ed in today’s New York Times by the primary researchers of the Education Recovery Scorecard

❓If you’re a faculty member on a campus, what are you seeing in terms of what students know now compared to pre-pandemic? Hit reply to tell me more.

SUPPLEMENTS

🍊 Florida, Florida, Florida. With so much focus on the higher ed policies of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Michael Horn and I decided to call up a Florida governor from two decades ago who also came under fire for his higher ed changes: Jeb Bush. Bush joined us on a recent episode of the Future U. podcast. “I was impatient, I wanted to get stuff done. I had a big agenda and I wanted to do it at warp speed,” Bush told us about his agenda, which included eliminating affirmative action in admissions. (Future U.)

🎓 Struggling to Stay Enrolled. “More than 2 in 5 college students said they considered stopping out of their academic programs within a six-month period, according to a survey from the Lumina Foundation and Gallup. More than half of students who considered stopping out attributed their thinking to emotional stress. A little under half reported they were considering stopping due to personal mental health reasons, and just under 30% said it was because of college costs.” (Higher Ed Dive)

🏫 Work-Study in College for K-12 Help. “Colleges should use the Federal Work-Study program to place more of their students in K-12 school support roles, like tutoring, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona also encouraged colleges to use other programs, such as those centered around credit-bearing volunteer or civic engagement work, to help fill student support roles.” (Higher Ed Dive)