About the Episode
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About the Episode:
Most students aren’t dropping out because they’re disengaged—they’re falling behind because your tech isn’t meeting their needs. In this energizing episode, Dustin chats with Shana Holman, Head of Strategic Engagement and Alliances at Pathify, about the results of Pathify’s 2025 Student Digital Experience Survey. They unpack why digital friction is far more than an IT problem—it's a barrier to academic success, mental health, and student belonging.
From the mounting demand for unified platforms to the hidden equity issues plaguing your tech stack, this episode makes a compelling case for why the student experience must be reimagined—and what institutions can do today to make real progress.
Key Takeaways
- Digital friction in higher ed is a systemic barrier—not just an IT inconvenience—impacting student success, engagement, and sense of belonging.
- 66% of students navigate multiple systems to complete simple tasks, increasing cognitive load and lowering academic performance.
- Only 33% of students use school tech to find community or clubs, relying instead on flyers, word-of-mouth, or third-party apps like Discord or Instagram.
- 47% of students have missed critical deadlines due to fragmented platforms and ineffective communication.
- First-gen students are 33% less likely to describe their digital experience positively, highlighting equity issues in digital access.
- A unified digital platform can significantly improve student communication, reduce friction, and increase retention—making it a need-to-have, not a nice-to-have.
- 32% of students would reconsider enrolling at an institution due to a poor digital experience.
- Investing in digital experience design benefits all student demographics—from first-years to grad students—especially as hybrid learning becomes the norm.
Episode Summary: What’s Holding Students Back in the Digital Era?
What is the Student Digital Experience Survey and Why Was It Conducted?
Pathify’s 2025 Student Digital Experience Survey, conducted in partnership with Thrive Analytics, gathered responses from over 1,000 college and university students to assess how campus technology is impacting the student experience. The motivation? A noticeable disconnect between the intuitive digital world students live in and the fragmented systems they face in higher ed. Instead of relying on anecdotal feedback, this study puts hard data behind the friction points that are often brushed off as minor tech hiccups. The findings confirm that digital experiences directly influence engagement, retention, and even mental health.
The survey is more than just a snapshot of student preferences—it quantifies the real cost of digital disorganization. From missing deadlines to struggling with mental overload, students are experiencing unnecessary roadblocks that institutions can remove. Shana Holman emphasizes that institutions don’t just need to improve tech for convenience—they must do it to enable academic success.
As Shana puts it, “Digital friction isn’t just annoying. It’s actively harming students’ ability to learn and stay engaged.” If you’re building ed tech tools or shaping digital strategy, this survey offers a wake-up call grounded in reality.
Why Are Students Demanding Unified Digital Platforms?
Students aren’t comparing their school portals to other universities—they’re comparing them to Amazon, Netflix, and DoorDash. This is what Shana Holman calls the experience gap, and it’s widening. A full 59% of students say their school’s tech doesn’t measure up to their everyday consumer apps—and they believe it should.
Holman breaks the challenge down into four drivers of student demand for unified platforms:
- Experience Gap: Students expect seamless, intuitive digital interactions.
- Cognitive Load: System-hopping drains mental energy and leads to missed tasks.
- Legacy Silos: Departments have built fragmented solutions that don’t communicate.
- Stakeholder Complexity: Institutional politics make it hard to drive tech unification.
In essence, students are tired of bouncing between 6–10 different systems just to complete one task. And this isn’t just about tech fatigue—it’s about whether students can actually function in the environments built for them. Students want a “single pane of glass” experience, and schools that don’t deliver are risking not just frustration, but attrition.
How Can Tech Tools Actually Build Community?
One of the most surprising findings in the Pathify survey? Only 33% of students use campus technology to find clubs, orgs, or social spaces. Instead, they’re relying on flyers, word-of-mouth, or social media platforms that live outside the university ecosystem.
This is what Holman calls the analog gap. Even in 2025, most institutions are missing a massive opportunity to digitally facilitate belonging. Worse, only 28% of students use their institution’s app for peer-to-peer communication, meaning students are building community in third-party spaces—out of sight, out of reach, and out of alignment with institutional goals.
Schools that centralize student life features into a unified app see dramatically higher engagement. In fact, 57% of Pathify-partnered students use the campus app for communication, a 2x improvement over the national average. Institutions don’t have to control these interactions—they just need to offer an entry point. A well-designed platform becomes a catalyst for connection, not a constraint.
How Does Digital Friction Hurt Academic Success?
The link between tech and learning outcomes is clearer than ever. According to the survey, 47% of students have missed critical academic or administrative deadlines simply because they didn’t know something was due. When systems don’t talk to each other and reminders don’t reach students where they are, the result is unnecessary failure.
But it goes deeper. 57% of students report that digital system stress is stacking up, and 41% say it directly impacts their ability to learn. When your mental energy is spent figuring out how to register for a course or pay a bill, there’s little left for engaging with content or studying for exams.
Equity gaps are particularly pronounced here. First-gen students are 33% less likely to report a positive digital experience, highlighting how current systems disadvantage those who lack institutional or cultural capital. This isn’t just about UX—it’s about student retention, satisfaction, and equity.
Finally, 32% of students say they’d reconsider enrolling based on their digital experience alone. That’s nearly one in three prospective students who may choose another school—not because of rankings or cost, but because the digital experience sends a signal about whether the institution is prepared to support them.
About the Show: The Higher Ed Geek Podcast explores the impact of edtech on the student experience by speaking with diverse leaders from institutions, companies, and nonprofit organizations. Each week we aim to provide an engaging, fun, and relevant dose of professional development that honors the wide range of work happening all across the higher ed ecosystem. Come geek out with us! The Higher Ed Geek Podcast is hosted by Dustin Ramsdell and is a proud member of the Enrollify Podcast Network.
Connect With Our Host:
Dustin Ramsdell
Enrollify is produced by Element451 — the next-generation AI student engagement platform helping institutions create meaningful and personalized interactions with students. Learn more at element451.com.
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