student journey mapping university

September 26, 2019

Experience Design Tool: Improving the Student Journey from Applicant to Alum

Designing Experiences

By Elliot Felix

Colleges and universities are trying to better analyze, improve, and compete on student experience, but they face three big challenges: they lack a shared definition and understanding of what they mean by “student experience;” they lack a holistic approach that connects different departments, services, and technologies; and student experience is typically assessed (if at all) through separate student surveys with low response rates that aren’t readily acted upon.

No matter how good their assessments, institutions still need an alignment tool that helps them synthesize what they know, uncover what they don’t, identify the student experience pain points, and spark collaboration across departments to make things better for students. So, building on the success of other tools we’ve created and courses we’ve taught, we created the Student Experience Canvas to help institutions literally get on the same page.

Why are Colleges and Universities Focusing on the Student Journey?

Based on our work with over 80 institutions, we’ve observed that while the nuances may vary, institutions have three aspects in common when they commit to a focus on student experience. First, they aspire to be “student-centered” by considering things from the student point of view – the Gates Foundation has an initiative on “ Student Centered Colleges ” on this very topic. Second, institutions act on this student-centered approach to design more effective and efficient services, policies, processes, and systems for students to interact with; for instance, if a student has a registration problem that turns out to be bill payment problem that’s caused by a financial aid issue, should she have to go to three different places to resolve it? Third, institutions aspire to better utilize data to measure and improve the impact of these interactions in terms of key metrics like acceptance rate, engagement, retention, graduation, and alumni giving – to name a few.

A student’s experience is a kind of mosaic built from his or her physical and digital interactions with the range of offerings from the school. These include academic programs, technology systems for everything from paying a bill to taking a course, administrative services like registration and financial aid, academic services like advising and tutoring, facilities like dorms and classrooms, and students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community.

What is the Student Experience Canvas?

The Student Experience Canvas is a tool to understand and improve your students’ experience holistically across all the different touchpoints along their journey from applicant to alum. The Canvas can be completed by students themselves, faculty, and/or staff from academic affairs, student affairs, technology, facilities, assessment, and other areas. Working individually or in teams in a facilitated workshop, you imagine different types of students, evaluate students’ journeys made up of touchpoints over time, identify what’s working and what isn’t in the current experience, and then reflect on the journey to identify priorities and questions.

The Canvas enables colleges and universities to synthesize what’s known, reveal what’s unknown, and combine different departments and perspectives to spark collaboration by taking a design thinking approach to student experience. First, we employ a student-centered ethos so institutions can design student services not around their internal business process or the technical requirements of their technology but based on the students’ needs. Second, with a holistic sense of what’s working and what isn’t, institutions can make progress by prototyping new programs, services, spaces, and technology tools to address specific pain points (e.g., summer melt) and our specific segments (e.g., first-gen students).

Beyond the holistic, design thinking philosophy embedded in the Canvas, it also has four important design principles:

• Adopt Student-POV : Completing the Canvas can be done by students themselves or by college and university staff based on what they have heard from students directly during interviews, workshops, surveys, and other research as well as what they’ve learned about students through other assessment activities (e.g., data analytics on LMS usage).
• Segment Students : Institutions may get started by creating one general Canvas for their overall student experience, but should then segment their students into strategic categories. There is no single “student experience” but rather a mosaic of them; for instance, there might be specific pain points and bright spots for a first-gen STEM student compared to a returning adult learner shifting careers.
• Organize by Persona : For each student segment, you will complete a Canvas by summarizing a student persona, evaluating their current experience, and reflecting on the journey to identify priorities and questions. These personas can be from national studies or be specific to the institution.
• Evaluate the Student Journey : To evaluate the current experience, the Canvas considers two dimensions together: the touchpoints students interact with including academic programs, student services, technology, facilities, and community as well as the phases of the student journey over time. We think about these as six stages in progression: apply > adjust > approach > advance > attain > affiliate.

What’s in the Student Experience Canvas?

The Student Experience Canvas contains four sections: student persona, evaluating the student experience, vision and goals, and planning implementation.

Step 1. Personas : Each canvas you complete will correspond to a segment of your student population. While there is not one student experience (and Malcolm Gladwell’s TED Talk on spaghetti sauce is great background on this philosophy), we’ve found that sometimes doing a more general, overall student experience first is a great way to get oriented before moving into specific segments.

• Institutions may have an existing set of personas, want to use an existing set that represents students nationally such as the Lumina Institute’s personas , or create new ones ( this page in the Learning Space Toolkit we co-created with NC State is a good free resource).
• Regardless, students, faculty, or staff can start by summarizing the motivations, behaviors, and expectations of their personas which correspond to different segments of their population, and then summarize the persona in a name that captures the essence of the persona, like “Career Shifter.” (hint: these typically contain a verb ending in -or or -er)

Step 2. Evaluating the Student Journey : The Canvas evaluates the student journey along phases of time from applicant to alum as students interact with touchpoints including programs, services, technology, facilities, and communities.

A. Touchpoints : The Canvas asks college and university staff to consider what students interact with, and each moment of interaction is a “ touchpoint ” for a student, which can be a pain point or a bright spot in their experience. The touchpoints to consider are:

• Academic Programs: Interactions, relationships, projects, and motivations related to degree and non-degree programs Student Services: Academic and admin support such as admissions, enrollment, finance, advising, library, and career
• Technology: Technology hardware, software, and infrastructure for creating, communicating, and collaborating
• Campus Facilities: Classrooms, dining, health, laboratory, library, residential, sports and study spaces
• Community and Culture: Belonging, feeling supported, having a say, opportunities to lead, participating in groups/activities

B. Phases : An experience is made up of these student interactions over time. The phases of the student journey include the following:

• Apply: Searching for, applying to, and deciding on a school
• Adjust: Getting oriented to the school’s programs, people, and places
• Approach: Early experiences to explore different topics & communities
• Advance: Later experience to focus on progressing along a selected path
• Attain: Transitioning to becoming part of the workforce
• Affiliate: Staying connected to and affiliated with the school as an alum

Step 3. Reflection : Once you’ve completed the evaluation of the student journey – qualitatively and quantitatively – it’s time to reflect and prioritize to identify the top three to five student pain points to address or “ bright spots ” to sustain and scale up. This reflection will also likely uncover gaps in your knowledge that you’ll need to fill by working with students and staff from other departments, by gathering new data, or by analyzing data you have in new ways.

How Will You Move Ahead?

Once you have thought about your students, evaluated their experiences, prioritized their needs, and identified future questions, what should you do next? We recommend that you set your vision and goals, identify actions by department/group to hold staff accountable, and conduct prototyping and piloting of the proposed changes to create some quick wins that build momentum and refine your ideas.

Keep your eye out for a companion tool we’ll soon by launching – The Student Experience Roadmap – to prompt and organize these next steps. In the interim, we’ll explain these steps below.

Set your Vision and Goals : Look across the Canvases you’ve completed, and create your overall student experience vision and goals. (You will probably have somewhere between 6 to 10 refined Canvases to represent your different student segments.)

• Your vision describes is your ideal future state (e.g., Bill Gates’s vision in the 90s: “A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software.”). This will likely be common across personas.
• Your goals are the major specific things you’ll need to do to make it happen. A great way to get this started is to write a bunch of “From ____ to _____ so that ____.” statements that you can shape into a set of goals.

Plan for Implementation : Once you’ve evaluated the current experience and then set vision and goals, it’s time to get into the implementation mindset and start thinking about how to sustain and scale up what’s working and address the pain points that aren’t.

• Given that many student experience problems occur where greater coordination or integration is needed – the course registration problem that turns out to be a bill payment problem that turns out to be a financial aid problem – think about accountability within and across departments by identifying actions needed to address the priorities you identified.
• To apply the design thinking mindset, you should prototype and pilot your ideas. So, identify some options and look for ways to test your ideas, reduce risk, and build momentum. Something as easy as a pop-up service point at a table in a building lobby can teach you a lot while demonstrating your commitment to meet students where they are.

Using the Student Experience Canvas, college and university staff can better understand, improve, and compete on the basis of their student experience. Completing a canvas will spark collaboration and coordination across departments and help create a shared definition and understanding of what they mean by “student experience” to promote a holistic approach that looks across the different parts of the institution that students interact with along their journey from applicant to alum.

Good luck as you move ahead!

We’d also love to hear from you about how you’re using the Canvas and what feedback you have on it – please drop us a line . We are always trying to improve our tools and help colleges and universities transform their student experience.

PS: If you’d like more of a “blank” Canvas approach where you can define your own rows and columns based on terminology your institution already uses, you can download that version here .

Related articles

• Defining “Experience”
• Defining Design Strategy
• A More Equitable Student Experience
• How Three Institutions are Assessing Their Student Experience
• Library Design: The Arrival Experience

Student Journey Mapping: Redefining the Student Experience

by James Wiley, Eduventures Senior Fellow at Encoura | Sep 1, 2020 | All Topics , Technology Research

To understand the extent to which student journey mapping efforts are being used by institutions of higher education, we used Google searches and web scraping to find as many examples as we could. As shown in Figure 2 below, the output of this research revealed:

• 324 webpages had occurrences of at least one of our search terms, 222 of which were non-vendor and institutional sites.
• 34 webpages had either a student journey map or reflected a student journey approach.
• 24 webpages had at least one component.
• Five webpages had student journey maps had four components—the most of any in our sample: Arizona State University, Georgia Southern University, Laurentian University, New York University, and University of New Mexico.

On the surface, our research suggests that very few institutions have engaged in student journey mapping. Because this analysis relied on publicly available information, however, more schools may implement the practice of student journey mapping but decide to keep it confidential. Likewise, of the student journey maps we examined, there is little evidence that most of the institutions implemented the maps as part of an ongoing practice to better track progress of specific efforts for continuous improvement.

The most developed example of student journey mapping and implementation we found is Arizona State University (ASU). Its mapping approach , aligned with its lifelong learning efforts, includes a set of metrics, norms, and processes to better track, understand, and improve the student experience.

Under the leadership of the director of enrollment analysis (Office of the Provost), ASU spent six months gathering 65 data points and “student process artifacts,” engaged more than 40 people across 12 departments, and convened more than 30 interviews and workshops. The primary focus of student journey mapping has been on the post-enrollment to graduation portion of the student life cycle, with less attention paid to pre-enrollment or alumni stages.

The Bottom Line

We suggest three considerations for any institution seeking to develop and implement student journey mapping to improve the student experience:

• Place students at the center of the effort: The goal of student journey mapping is to improve the quality of student interactions with the institution. Therefore, it is critical to ensure that any school embarking on a student journey mapping process first recognizes that not all students are the same and that they will experience similar interactions differently. Developing student personas (something ASU has also done), for example, is a valuable way to capture different student types and view how they progress along their journeys.
• Bring together institutional stakeholders: Some institutional maps appear to be narrow (focusing on admissions, for example), focused on one aspect of the student journey. Narrow journey mappings, however, may also signal a challenge in bringing together stakeholders from multiple departments, such as admissions, facilities, teaching and learning, and student support. Developing a journey map that encompasses the entire student journey will require thinking through all the unique touchpoints between a school and its students and the involvement of representatives from each touchpoint.
• Establish key performance indicators for measuring success: It is essential to develop metrics by which institutional leaders can determine whether the student journey map is successful in helping them deliver that quality experience. Without a review of metrics, there is a risk that the student journey map becomes a “point in time” artifact that does not help institutions understand the precise areas where they can improve the student experience.

It is striking that few institutions have embarked on mapping efforts—or that at least few have made sufficient progress to justify public disclosure. The typical institution has no shortage of concerns about student engagement, achievement, and attrition, not to mention disparities by student type and background. The pandemic may force schools to pay more attention to the student journey but may equally sideline ambitious initiatives. It will be interesting to see whether mapping efforts grow in number from today’s small base and whether pioneers such as ASU start to reap the rewards in terms of recruitment, retention and reputation.

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Thursday, September 3, 2020 at 2PM ET/1PM CT

Hindsight is 2020. While the uncertainty of the past several months has provided us with unforeseen challenges, it also offered us guidance on how to better prepare for the future.

On Thursday, September 3rd, President Brent Ramdin will be joined by University of Tampa’s AVP of Enrollment, Brent Benner, as well as Encoura Enrollment Consultant, Tye Mortenson, as they discuss how University of Tampa was able to navigate the challenges of the last recruitment cycle. The conversation will focus on the impact of test optional on admissions, the increased competition for out-of-state students, and the urgency to pivot to virtual recruiting methods.

Join us to learn how the University of Tampa is rising to the challenges of 2021 leveraging Encoura Data Lab and rolling out new practices. Participants will gain insights into best practices needed to make the class in 2021.

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Transforming Our Professional Services

UCL Student Journey Map

In 2020 we worked with external partners to develop the UCL Student Journey map in order to better understand students' journeys on UCL undergraduate and master’s programmes. 

We invited students to take part in a series of interactive 'Student Journey Mapping' workshop to exploring what they felt worked well, and where we might improve the UCL student experience, covering everything from induction right through to examinations. 

The UCL Student Journey map highlights the key steps in a student’s journey through UCL. We used this to identify the critical touchpoints and activities to which students attach the most value and expect the highest possible standards of service from UCL, and to inform the five key challenges the Student Experience Transformer aims to address.

• View UCL Student Journey Map as a PDF 

Laying the groundwork

During this stage students connect with their cohort and fellow students ahead of classes

Steps in the journey

• I accept my offer and start to plan
• International students – I arrange my visa

Getting sorted

Students receive clear and consistent messaging from all parts of the University

• On campus students – I prepare to travel to London
• I complete essential admin
• On campus students – I plan my life in London
• I set up UCL systems and apps
• I prepare for my commencement at UCL

Ready to start

Students are communicated with regularly and encounter minimal last minute changes to modules, programmes or timetables

• I set up my new student life
• I prepare for my course
• I get a sense of student life
• I complete role admin

Getting involved

• On campus students – I set up my accommodation
• I get to know UCL
• On campus students – I attend a UCL campus tour and online welcome events
• Remote students – I attend online welcome events, including virtual site visits

Commencement 

Students feel part of a UCL community and have access to a variety of socialising opportunities to meet their needs

Students receive tailored support from academic staff and their Personal Tutor, giving them confidence they are on the right track

• On campus students – I meet other students on campus and connect with those studying remotely
• Remote students – I connect with other students and sign up to online clubs and societies
• I engage with UCL academic staff
• I engage with student reps
• I engage with student life
• I learn how to be a student
• I get set up for term

Students have a comprehensive knowledge of all the support services and resources that UCL offers

Feedback on assessments is timely and delivered in a constructive and sufficiently detailed manner to enable students to learn and improve

Communications are consistent and students know exactly where to go to access information

• I start to access available support services
• I complete ongoing coursework
• I engage academically outside my coursework
• I complete in term assessment
• I get support if I need it
• On campus students – I use the library and study spaces
• Remote students – I use the remove library services and create my own study space
• On campus students – I use other campus facilities
• Remote students – I use remote-student facilities
• My student life extends beyond UCL 
• I am kept informed by UCL
• I make the most of extra opportunities at UCL
• I plan for my career
• I sit in-term exams

End of year

Students have timely access to exam support and a suitable space to complete their exams that does not inhibit concentration

• I plan for the next academic year
• I sit end of year exams
• I plan for a life after UCL
• I find out my results

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Defining student journey mapping in higher education: The ‘how-to’ guide for implementation on campus

Click the button below to download the full text of the article.

Abstract : A definitive process for reshaping the student experience — student journey mapping — allows for campus administrators to draw unique insights from the perspective of their key audience. Rooted in creating a user-centric experience, the concept of user journey mapping, also known as customer experience mapping, can be a cornerstone for projects in higher education. From changing the way in which students are recruited to the way donors are engaged, the student journey mapping process can help good business practices evolve into great ones. This process will describe how to bring together quantitative and qualitative data from multiple campus stakeholders (staff, faculty, students, etc.) and translate these data into insights that can reshape the student experience. Most importantly, the process describes how to develop this into actionable information that a campus community can understand. This paper will define the process of student journey mapping and provide campus administrators with concrete examples. Additionally, details are provided on how to best capture qualitative and quantitative data sets to inform the journey map. Finally, the connection between these data sets and the implementation plan is detailed to allow for actionable items to stem from the creation of a journey map.

Keywords : student journey mapping; marketing; communications; student services; websites; customer experience

JP Rains is the Director of the Digital Strategy Office at his alma mater of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. He oversees the institution’s digital footprint on the web and through social media while aiming to increase the digital IQ of the campus community. He is also President of Rains Media, where he works as a consultant in marketing and communication to private industry. Prior to this, Rains led strategy for two years as Vice-President of Strategy for Soshal Group, a digital agency working with a focus on clients in higher education. His work at Soshal led to multiple national awards and record setting performance for clients including: York University, University of New Brunswick and Cambrian College. He started his career after graduation at Laurentian University, working in the Office of Student Recruitment, followed by roles in various offices including: Marketing & Communications, Office of the Chief of Staff and Information Technology before joining Soshal Group. Rains has seen multiple years of success in student recruitment, including two years of 20 per cent plus increases to applications. Rains has consulted with over 25 Canadian and US-based higher education institutions and has implemented the Student Journey Mapping process with more than a dozen campuses. Additionally, he has interviewed over 1,000 stakeholders through the journey mapping process in an effort to deeply understand the perspectives of prospective students, current students, alumni and donors. Rains is the board chair of the Post-Secondary Education Web Conference of Canada and is a board member of the Laurentian University Alumni Association.

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Login via your organisation, defining student journey mapping in higher education: the ‘how-to’ guide for implementation on campus.

A definitive process for reshaping the student experience — student journey mapping — allows for campus administrators to draw unique insights from the perspective of their key audience. Rooted in creating a user-centric experience, the concept of user journey mapping, also known as customer experience mapping, can be a cornerstone for projects in higher education. From changing the way in which students are recruited to the way donors are engaged, the student journey mapping process can help good business practices evolve into great ones. This process will describe how to bring together quantitative and qualitative data from multiple campus stakeholders (staff, faculty, students, etc.) and translate these data into insights that can reshape the student experience. Most importantly, the process describes how to develop this into actionable information that a campus community can understand. This paper will define the process of student journey mapping and provide campus administrators with concrete examples. Additionally, details are provided on how to best capture qualitative and quantitative data sets to inform the journey map. Finally, the connection between these data sets and the implementation plan is detailed to allow for actionable items to stem from the creation of a journey map.

The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.

Author's Biography

Jp Rains is the Director of the Digital Strategy Office at his alma mater of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. He oversees the institution’s digital footprint on the web and through social media while aiming to increase the digital IQ of the campus community. He is also President of Rains Media, where he works as a consultant in marketing and communication to private industry. Prior to this, Rains led strategy for two years as Vice-President of Strategy for Soshal Group, a digital agency working with a focus on clients in higher education. His work at Soshal led to multiple national awards and record setting performance for clients including: York University, University of New Brunswick and Cambrian College. He started his career after graduation at Laurentian University, working in the Office of Student Recruitment, followed by roles in various offices including: Marketing & Communications, Office of the Chief of Staff and Information Technology before joining Soshal Group. Rains has seen multiple years of success in student recruitment, including two years of 20 per cent plus increases to applications. Rains has consulted with over 25 Canadian and US-based higher education institutions and has implemented the Student Journey Mapping process with more than a dozen campuses. Additionally, he has interviewed over 1,000 stakeholders through the journey mapping process in an effort to deeply understand the perspectives of prospective students, current students, alumni and donors. Rains is the board chair of the Post-Secondary Education Web Conference of Canada and is a board member of the Laurentian University Alumni Association.

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X Marks the Spot: Understanding Student Journey Mapping in Higher Education

• Electric Kite

Much has been written about the complicated nature of choosing, applying to, and enrolling in a college. The process is often a messy, confusing, and stressful experience for both prospective students and their parents during what should be one of the most exciting times in their lives. But it doesn’t need to be this way.

Student journey mapping offers a way for institutions to collect data from real students, parents, alumni, and donors regarding the barriers they face along their journeys and how to eliminate these pain points through a simplified process. Using these maps, higher ed administrators are able to zoom out, gain a better understanding of the challenges their audiences face, and implement solutions that address these pressing problems.

To discuss student journey mapping in more detail, we welcomed JP Rains, Laurentian University’s Director of Digital Strategy, to the Hashtag Higher Ed Podcast. In this episode, Rains explains why your institution needs a student journey map and offers a step-by-step guide to creating journey maps that lead to tangible improvements in the customer experience.

What is student journey mapping, and why does it matter?

“One of the challenges or opportunities for us in higher education is that students are both our consumer and our product,” says Rains, who sees student journey mapping as a core building block of a student-centric experience. “We really have to focus on them before anything else.”

“When you’re building the student journey, you’re building the case for making data-driven decisions that are based off of student experiences,” says Rains. In Rains’ experience, student journey mapping allows higher ed institutions to answer three key questions:

• What are the most important elements of the student journey and what challenges does your institution face within those particular elements?
• Where should you focus institutional efforts to have the biggest impact on the student journey?
• What impact has your efforts had on qualitative metrics like student satisfaction within specific steps of the journey?

When should schools implement student journey mapping?

“There’s no bad time to start,” says Rains. “I often see institutions embarking on mapping the student journey while that’s aligned with other process changes.” This allows schools to benchmark where they are now and measure the impact of process changes they think will improve the student journey.

Having a student journey map effectively “eliminates a lot of the anecdotal conversations that can sometimes be counterintuitive to some of the data you gathered,” says Rains. Common opportunities to take advantage of such data-driven decision making include strategic plan initiatives, major web project rebuilds, or process changes.

What are the key elements of the student journey map?

According to Rains, there are seven essential elements involved in student journey mapping.

1. Entry points: Where does the journey begin? What was the first point of contact a prospective student had in terms of an interaction with your brand? There are usually three major types of entry points: in-person, online, and social media.

2. Audience: Who are you focusing on? “I recommend [student journey maps] to be focused on audiences,” says Rains. “Those goals, activities, emotions, and barriers are going to be different depending on your audience type.” For example, focusing on prospective students could involve creating three different maps for domestic students, international students, and online students.

3. Goals: What are the goals your target audience is looking to achieve? “I like to have no more than three goals as part of an audience member’s journey,” says Rains. A prospective student’s three main goals in the application process might be to narrow down their short list of schools and apply to them, receive an offer of admission, and finally, to enroll.

4. Activities: What are the key steps in the process that these students go through? “Goals can often be confounded with activities,” says Rains. “While a goal might be to pass all exams, an activity would be to go through the exam period.”

5. Emotions: What are students feeling during those different steps in the process? “When you identify a part of the student journey that says at this point, the student is very stressed out, you need to be cognizant of that and reduce the level of things you’re expecting from them,” says Rains.

6. Barriers: What are the biggest challenges students face at each stage in the journey? “The student journey can be very complex. How do you internalize that complexity as an organization and provide simplicity to your student experience?” says Rains of how to effectively address barriers.

7. Insights: What can we do to simplify each step in the student journey? “These insights will really form your implementation plan,” says Rains. After your mapping process is complete, rank your list of insights in order of priority and tackle them accordingly.

Ready to kick off student journey mapping at your institution? Listen to the full episode to hear Rains discuss the six steps involved in the student journey mapping process, how to avoid common challenges that may crop up, and tips for getting started today.

Many thanks to JP Rains for joining us on this episode of the Hashtag Higher Ed Podcast. You can find JP on LinkedIn , Twitter (@jp_Rains) , or by visiting his website .

Listen to this episode, and previous episodes of the Hashtag Higher Ed Podcast, on Soundcloud , iTunes , Google Music , or wherever podcasts are found. To explore previous episodes of the Hashtag Higher Ed podcast and sign up for alerts regarding new episodes, visit our Hashtag Higher Ed hub .

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• Key Points to Achieving and Integrating a Comprehensive Student Journey Map

• Eddie Cook, Corporate Director of Admissions, Asher College
• Maggie Zaman, Director of Admissions & Marketing, California Career Institute
• Loren Ellison, Key Accounts Executive, LeadSquared

Key Takeaways:

• This webinar follows in the footsteps of education industry experts who talked about LeadSquared’s 360-degree solution for their institutes with the power of its complete admissions platform for student acquisition, application tracking, student journey tracking, enrollment, and more.
• The webinar concentrates on how an optimized student journey mapping can smoothen out institutes onboarding students from an inquiry to admission.
• The concept of a non-linear student journey map was discussed which says that student’s journey map has no real end.

“A Students Journey Has No Real End”

Does it read like philosophy?

No, let’s have a closer look, but this time, to provoke a ‘challenge.’

The challenge was posed by Loren Ellison, who wants to re-think everything about a student’s journey.

She asked her webinar audience to imagine the student journey as a cycle.

Her hypothesis is simple.

• A student enquires,
• Gets admission
• Enrolls for a course
• Their course progresses
• They graduate
• They continue education which starts again with an inquiry.

This is one of the many examples of successful student journey mapping .

Experts on the webinar panel discussed such examples.

These experts are professionals in the education sector, thriving for over a decade.

But before you read on, here’s a small recap for context’s sake.

A student journey map is a non-linear timeline that starts with their decision-making process.

Then it touches on various hotspots, like knowledge gathering and emotional microdecisions.

For a not-so-clinical approach, a student journey tries to achieve some goals.

Goals like gaining insights and improving touchpoints to  increase the chances of enrolment.

What Student Journey Map Really Tells Us?

The student journey map provides a snapshot of how students interact with institutions.

Simply put, a journey map identifies the interaction between a user and a company.

The journey is identified over time and across all the channels they use.

It depicts the user’s journey, in this case – students. 

The map is a snapshot of different phases of getting to know them.

It can highlight things like

• student entry and exit points
• frequency, nature
• effectiveness of various touch points.

It highlights what works vs. what does not work.

Key insights help forecast and plan for  enrollment targets  .

It also helps in  student engagement  initiatives.

LeadSquared played a crucial role in transforming Maggie’s institute in this particular instance.

LeadSquared a) translated her vision and b) personalized and provided targeted solutions.

More than 500 career schools use LeadSquared’s powerful, all-in-one CRM and marketing platform to gain remarkable efficiencies across every aspect of admissions which is what transformed California Career Institute.

LeadSquared’s enrollment automation can help you:

• Work smarter, slash costs, optimize student experience
• Increase inquiry-to-enrollment speed
• Zero lead leakage with complete data capture
• Centralized lead management
• Run targeted communication campaigns

Technology Brings True Personalization

Eddie Cook, Corporate Director of Admission, Asher College, explained how automation adds to the fine print of personalization.

“It is like a row of dominoes, right?”

“You have 30 dominoes and the very first domino is the student inquiry, they flip that first domino, and that’s the first action,” explained Robert.

“Because of that first action, the automation, flips over the rest of the dominoes and it does everything for you,” he added. 

He also explained streamlining the process of replying to enquirers.

The quick response time was done through automation by LeadSquared.

Selling or reducing response time is not new to LeadSquared, you can now empower your response team with LS’s on-the-go  mobile CRM .

“I’ve added a lot of human touch to it. I’ve added a lot of components that allow me to connect with students,” said Maggie.

So, technology is used to fine-tune personalized messages with a quick response time. 

It is to make connections stronger during entry/exit points.

All of these to maximize efficiency in

a) reaching out to more students

b) optimizing student journey map.

This kind of personalization through automation can be resourceful, significantly when a longer response time to basic queries from students can drive them away.

“So technology can help you with mapping each student touchpoint as we talked about achieving faster response times at ease team and incredible, less than one minute speed to lead, leading to better engagement,” mentioned Loren Ellison, Key Accounts Executive, LeadSquared.

A report by the  National Student Clearinghouse Research Center  (NSCRC) estimated a 4.1% dip in undergraduate and graduate student enrollment, equaling about 685,000 students in spring 2022.

With personalization, institutions might effectively tackle the declining enrollment numbers and punch it with effective student journey mapping, and the results could be nothing short of a miracle.

Eddie Cook shared a quick comparison between pre-LeadSquared and post-LeadSquared days at Ashford.

“We had a homegrown CRM that had worked, it worked well, it wasn’t great, but it worked well,” he said while stumbling upon the fact that through LeadSquared powered automation, he essentially could get rid of manual follow-ups and check-in on students.

“By automating that and saying, hey, look, this is the next person you want to reach out to or don’t forget to follow up with this person,” he added.

Personalized Student Portal

There’s a basket of solutions that tech-driven innovations can bring. For instance, faster and personalized response times can drive better engagement.

Here’s another example, a personalized student portal, an experience zone for the student to imagine their journey ahead, can help institutes make data-driven choices and get actionable insights for student journey maps.

Maggie Zarman did a quick walk-through of how ‘imagery’ played a big role and how LeadSquared-powered CRM had a profound impact in telling a story.

The first page starts with Student Portal online application login.

Once logged in, the first page gives students a view of all the programs.

The second page breaks down the admission process as digestible information.

The student applies and enrolls, followed by the application stored in Orban.

So, what Maggie observed is that

• Content should be strong
• Storytelling through imagery
• Personalization is important

It would seem that the institute is trying to articulate that “we have your back” – in more straightforward terms making  CRM  useful for students.

“So for me, the student portal has been really something innovative. I’ve had a lot of fun with it. But at the same time, I’ve seen how much it’s helped with improving our systems, the applications are coming in seamlessly, students are able to get on there 24/7, it works for you overnight.,” explained Maggie.

She referred to the LeadSquared-powered solution that transformed her student portal. 

A student portal is amongst the common student-college touchpoints, an essential part of a student’s journey map. Intuitive touchpoints like this also help institutes map their students better. 

Getting student journey mapping right can dramatically increase the application and  retention rates  —a case in point is Maggie’s anecdote. 

Mapping A Diverse Gen

“We can look at it by generations we have the Baby Boomers, Gen X millennials, Gen Z are sometimes called the Zoomers,” said Loren Ellis while explaining how diverse the student population is.

This very diversity demands the dismantling of what institutes think.

They treat student journeys linearly.

They ignore that everyone’s journey is unique, which requires respective journey mapping.

This understanding is what institutes need to internalize over time.

“It’s foolish to think that a singular student journey is going to fit all student’s situations,” added Loren.

Responding to this, Maggie talked about how invested she is in each student’s journey and their stories.

“I personally like to connect to the stories behind each and every one of the students,” explained Maggie.

“It really helps us to decipher the model of who our student is and so in doing that, we found ourselves at the heart point of our strategic enrollment management plan,” she added. 

This sentiment is something that LeadSquared grasps. 

LeadSquared’s power of one helps automate application process and student enrollment. It helps institutes map end-to-end student journeys – inquiry, applications, counselling, enrollment, and beyond!

We allow a merge of plans, thoughts, ideas, and various student touch points, all under one roof.

Call us, book us, ask us for a  demo , and let us be a part of your journey ahead.

Shibani has been driving the webinar program at LeadSquared for more than 6 years, bringing in experts from around the world, to share their expertise on different topics. She is also a writer and an email marketing expert, having sent over 7 million emails till date. She currently leads the brand marketing initiatives at LeadSquared.

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• You are currently on: Student Journey Mapping

Student Journey Mapping

Since 2016 the University has been using Journey Mapping to tell the overall story of its student experience - from their perspective.

Hundreds of students, from prospect to alumni, have participated in this insightful process which has resulted in numerous University initiatives to increase student success – from Strategy development (like the Student Digital Strategy) to significant capital projects (like Connected Experiences).    

This year we are undertaking a new Journey Mapping exercise to identify the top pain points for Academic roles important to the delivery of key University services,  starting with our Academic Heads. It will complement other planning and prioritisation activities (Business Capability Road Maps, IT Capability Plans, etc) around key University functions and recommend mana-enhancing system, process, and material improvements around each journey.

In parallel, we will be refreshing our existing Māori Undergraduate Student Journey Map.

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Education Marketing , Content Development , Education Lead Generation , Conversion Optimization , Blog

Student journey mapping: personalizing touchpoints & optimizing conversion.

14 November 2014

Date posted: November 14, 2014

Consider the last time you made an important purchase. While deliberating over your options, you probably went through some fairly common decision-making steps:

Now, consider how this typical consumer process compares to the steps students take when selecting a college. Do you know how your school fares as prospective students move from point A to point Z along the decision-making timeline? What kinds of experiences do they have when interfacing with your institution? Can you pinpoint those critical points of loss or conversion?

In the business world, savvy marketing teams study the journey of target customers, continually tweaking messaging and refining touch points to improve experience and boost conversion rates. It’s not surprising that higher ed recruitment teams are following suit, customizing commercial journey maps to suit the unique needs of their college or university – essentially, taking a walk in their prospects’ shoes to identify and improve gaps in performance. According to Hubspot , this is the way every organization should function, “elevating, honoring and giving pride of place to customers.”

Student journey mapping is a diagnostic tool that tells you where you’re engaging prospects well, and at what point you’re losing them to competitors. More than just another marketing funnel, it’s an essential component of effective education lead generation , conversion, and sustained student loyalty.

Here are a few practical approaches for constructing student journey maps for your school:

1. Organize Your Student Personas

Few higher education marketing initiatives can get off the ground without a clear definition of student personas – and journey mapping is no exception. The first stage in investigating how prospects engage with your school during their decision-making journey is to define your most prominent student personas – the audiences you’re most likely to attract and convert.

Although each persona will progress along the decision-making timeline in a similar way, they may vary quite substantially in how they engage with each milestone. For example, one persona may spend a considerable amount of time following your posts on social media, while another scours your website for information on financial aid. Where one persona will approach your admissions staff via email, another will prefer to call and speak with a representative directly. Colleges with a nuanced understanding of their primary personas are in a better position to understand their journey as potential applicants.

2. Identify College-Student Touchpoints

How do prospective students hear about your school, investigate its offerings, engage online, and get in touch with admissions? To understand the conversion journey of your most prominent personas, begin by identifying their most likely touchpoints – the moments were leads intersect with your college both online and in person. Similar to models used by Adaptive Path   and UX Apprentice , this initial step of journey mapping can be developed alongside a theoretical sales funnel:

Student Journey Map Phase One

Teamwork Yields Richer Results

It’s important to note that identifying typical touchpoints for each persona should be a collaborative effort between members of marketing and admissions teams. This is what CMO.com calls assembling a “cross-functional, customer-facing group” to build an “internal view” of how students interact with your institution. The process need not be high-tech – here’s how Designing CX approached journey mapping at a recent workshop in Singapore:

Designing CX’s Tabletop method uses the popular sticky-note approach to map out touchpoints for key personas, which allows the team to discuss, debate and move points as needed until a consensus is reached. Here is a somewhat more elaborate example from the University of New England in Australia, where students weighed in on touchpoints and expanded the map onto hallway walls:

More extensive maps can be built and added to over time – either online using a collaborative tool, or on paper using simple office supplies. Once you’ve established at what points prospective students are interfacing with your school, it’s time to move on to the next crucial stage in the journey mapping process.

3. Gather Feedback and Recognize Painpoints

For each one of its identified touchpoints, the college must consider the quality of the college/persona interaction. The only truly authentic way of generating this information, is to consult your students about their experience investigating and applying to your school.  Some higher ed institutions run usability tests on their websites, recruiting students to perform tasks on the site and then report on their experience. Journey mapping expands this concept by looking at touchpoints beyond the scope of the college website, such as emails received from admissions and a visit to the college campus.

To gather feedback about the quality of both virtual and in-person touchpoints, colleges may want to administer a short survey to current students, or talk with prospects about their “journey” during the admission process. Schools could also pose questions about student experience on their social media platforms or school blog – whatever gets students responding. The feedback you gather provides an important second dimension to your phase one map:

 Student Journey Map Phase Two

4. Strategize Improvements… and Repeat the Process!

By getting feedback on various key stages of your personas’ conversion journey, admissions and marketing teams can zero-in on identified painpoints, and strategize potential improvements.  At this stage, sharing the journey map document is key in order to include as many stakeholders as possible, including website designers, admission staff, campus tour leaders, and content developers. The final phase of the journey map requires the input of several experts in order to be effective:

  Student Journey Map: Final Product

Like many digital marketing initiatives, student journey mapping is a cyclical process of recognizing needs, developing and implementing strategies, measuring their impact – and starting all over again to make subsequent improvements. By tracking results using Google analytics , student feedback, and the observations of admissions staff, colleges will continue to expand and refine their student journey maps.

As higher ed tactics for engaging students grow increasingly technological, it’s important to consider the value and power of personalization – of humanizing the conversion process. By understanding and serving the needs of their primary personas, colleges minimize assumptions while maximizing the ROI for digital marketing campaigns.

Have you tried a version of student journey mapping? Tell us what you’ve learned about optimizing touchpoints between your college and its prospective students.

Categories: Education Marketing , Content Development , Education Lead Generation , Conversion Optimization , Blog

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How Student Journey Maps Help Both Colleges and Their Students

• Written by: Renee Seltzer
• Founder and CEO

What is a Student Journey Map?

A student journey map is a visual representation of a person’s process of accomplishing a goal. In other businesses, this is called a Customer Journey Map, while in higher ed we call it a Student Journey Map.

This diagram or graphical representation can depict several stages a student goes through as they interact with your university or college. A student journey map can start from awareness and go through graduation or becoming a donor.

The student journey map helps to connect different services, departments, technology, and communication touchpoints to provide a complete student experience.

We recommend breaking the student journey map into stages from the admissions enrollment experience, matriculated students through the first few classes (biggest drop risks), and then the rest of their educational experience at your institution. Your institution can also create a student journey map for alumni and another to capture your donor experience.

Student journey maps need to be rooted in data-driven research, along with qualitative feedback from faculty, staff, and current and prospective students that include a variety of touchpoints.

If you need help with your student journey map project or higher ed qualitative research , we are here to help.

Through student journey mapping, you can find out what your visitor’s true feelings and thoughts are as they engage with your institution and its enrollment experience. It allows you to capture your complex enrollment experience, which can be a mixture of website experience and offline, phone, and online application while crossing several departments, including transcripts, financial aid, admissions, and more.

Understanding your student’s journey will help your institution identify your enrollment pain points. Once you identify your most significant enrollment pain points, you can make the necessary adjustments to reduce the friction and frustration felt by your applicants. The goal is to improve the overall experience so you can improve your enrollment yield and have better enrollment outcomes for your next start.

If your project allows for it, you should conduct several qualitative interviews with various students throughout their enrollment cycle. From this qualitative research, you should be able to find out what motivated him or her to want to learn more about your school in the first place. In this article, we break down the steps needed to kick off your qualitative research.

Some questions to ask your interviewees:

• What first sparked your interest in our school? 
• How long ago was that? 
• What types of things happened between when you were first aware of our school to when you visited the website?
• What were your thoughts on our school before visiting the website?
• What were your thoughts after visiting the website? 
• Have they changed? 
• How have they changed?

A student journey map provides insight into authentic student experiences and the various challenges students face. A first-generation student will have different questions and even insecurities than a legacy enrollment.

Table of Contents

This example captures a 2-year experience for an international student.

This is a blank template.

Why You Should Check Out This Podcast?

See feedback from Chris below. You’ll hear tips on optimizing your student journey process to make it easier for students to enroll, improve your yield, and drive more referrals. Student preferences are changing faster than universities can manage the change. Find out which changes are the most important to focus on first.  

Listen to the Podcast Directly on the Website or Below 👇

Student Journey Mapping Podcast –

Why listen to this one.

Listen to the Student Journey Map Podcast through the Website

Does your university need a student journey map.

Most often, we don’t know exactly why one individual proceeds to enroll at your college or university, and another prospective student doesn’t. It can be challenging to replicate and scale if you don’t know exactly what is contributing to your enrollments.

If you’re tracking your enrollments, you may see that more than half of your applicants do not end up enrolling. Can you pinpoint why this may be happening? What can your institution do to get more of those applicants to enroll? A student journey map is a great first step to begin to solve this perplexing business question.

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” – Peter Drucker

More importantly, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

If you check out your website analytics, you may find that 95% of visitors leave without requesting more information or applying. While it’s unrealistic to get 100% of visitors into your enrollment funnel (since individuals visit your website for several different reasons), you should be able to increase your website conversion rates by 20%, 30%, or even 40% by better understanding what motivates your prospective students, and why they are leaving. With this new information, you can adjust your messaging, website flow, and user experience to improve the likelihood that more of your website visitors will turn into applicants and future students.

Student Journey Map Key Components

The goal is to create the journey maps based on actual enrollment scenarios you will show in a sequence of events. The key points to document are actions, thoughts, and emotions.

Most journey maps follow a similar format:

• At the top: a specific user, a specific scenario, and corresponding expectations or goals.
• In the middle: high-level phases comprised of user actions, thoughts, and emotions.
• At the bottom: takeaways including opportunities, insights, and internal ownership.

Difference Between a Process Map Vs. Student Journey Map

Both are important and serve different purposes. Let’s break each one down.

Process Map

A process flow map documents the exact process as it is today without any texture or emotions.

Recently, we did a process map and a student journey map for a community college. The process map was a written narrative of their enrollment process, and it was a 12-page document.

To fix your process, you first must document your process through a process map or a narrative of your process, in case it’s complex and requires more in-depth documentation.

Your process map needs to include what systems are being used, what triggers a prospective student to move to the next process, what internal and external communications happen, and so much more. You will also want to include issues that came up through your research. For this community college, we also provide a 95-page deck full of recommendations on improving their process, along with a 25-page memo.

Student Journey Map

As mentioned, a student journey map is a practice of empathy for the complexities of your enrollment process. It helps you understand what your prospective students must navigate through to enroll at your college or university.

In contrast to a process map, the student journey map is a 1-page document that, at a high level, identifies a student’s feelings as they move from one stage to the next.

A student journey map creates conversation, challenges assumptions, and gives true insight into how your prospective students feel as they go through your enrollment process.

Develop Student Personas

As a part of the student journey mapping process, your institution will want to develop personas.

Personas are fictional characters you will create to collectively represent your prospective or current student base. These personas are based on your research.

By personifying your current and prospective students, you’ll be able to visualize them as real people with families, challenges, and hopes. Personas will help your institution speak to specific people, which will help to anchor your marketing and advertising.

A word of warning: I’ve seen schools pick the wrong personas. They picked aspirational personas versus who their students are.  This backfired in their marketing because they would use imagery and messaging all targeting a persona that didn’t exist for them. Think of all the money that was wasted on ads that didn’t resonate.

To develop your personas, you will want to document a few variations and capture a prospective student’s cultural background (demographic specifics), expectations for earning a degree, what life stage they are in, and some psychographic information. This will help your college or university communicate more effectively, expand its reach, and establish stronger relationships.

You can decide on a few people that best signify your student population and/or one or two aspirational personas to whom you hope to start marketing. Remember, the word of warning is to not have too many aspirational personas.

The ultimate goal is to help colleges and universities learn more about their students’ experiences to refine marketing, increase enrollment, and better serve their students.

You may need to create a few different student journey maps based on your different personas.

For example, you may have a few undergraduate personas such as first-time college student, legacy college student, transfer student, etc.

For your graduate programs, you may have a persona or two.

Why Most Student Journey Maps Do NOT Work

In the past, colleges have hired researchers who would usually conduct in-person student journey mapping sessions with key organizational stakeholders.

Each individual would get a pack of sticky notes and update a huge document on the wall.

The researcher would then take all of these touchpoints and put them into a beautiful document.

However, the output tended to be a journey map that quickly becomes stale and does not get referenced in day-to-day decisions.

What went wrong?

Here are Student Journey Mapping Mistakes to Avoid:

To begin with, far too many schools include internal stakeholders in the mapping process but forget to invite those who have the answers: their prospective and current students .

First of all, who are your students? Have you clearly defined them? How are you reaching out and appealing to first-generation college students? How are you represented within the community to appeal to a diverse range of potential students? Are you speaking to the concerns of older students who have thought of returning to college to complete their degree or pursue a graduate degree?

Once you have defined who your student is, then you can begin to reach outwardly from the perspective of the student.

Another mistake is mapping the journey from the inside out, meaning you are focusing on getting your in-house perspectives and not the students’ perspectives. This shift in perspective allows you to notice and consider the moments of truth that greatly impact the student experience. Often the internal documented process is what actually happens in the real world.

The moments of truth:

Curiosity, excitement, hesitation, grand ambition, wariness, and hope can lead you to overcome another common oversight in student journey mapping: starting to track the process when your internal process kicks off, instead of when the student’s actual journey begins.

How to capture your student’s actual journey:

Find out what conversations your prospective students were having and with who, that led them to your website or to want to learn more about your institution.

You will need to find out what sparked their interest or curiosity in the first place. That is a key and invaluable insight into the beginning of their student journey and one to be aware of.

What Website Analytics Won’t Tell You, But You Need to Know

Through website analytics, you can find out where someone came from before landing on your website and get information about how he or she maneuvers around your website in aggregate. 

But what analytics won’t tell you is how he or she felt as they maneuvered around your website.

Was this person able to complete their task? Why or why not? Were they overwhelmed? Did they feel curious, welcome, engaged, or frustrated?

Field Studies 

Field studies can now be done online, but some still need to be done in person, especially if you want to capture your Admissions tour and on-campus Admissions process.

How to Kick Off Your User Interviews?

Through this study, we will uncover prospective students’ friction points that might be frustrating to them. These friction points may discourage them from filling out a request for more information, calling to schedule a tour, or applying to the college altogether. It will be essential to identify what you want to study and the goals for your study.

Where to Start:

• Conduct qualitative research and usability studies to discover your prospective students’ emotions, mindsets, and motivations.
• It’s important to identify the goals of your study and interviews.
• Draft your questions and test these questions on a few people before going live with your participants. 
• Find participants and decide if you will gift them for participating and how much you will gift them. 
• Conduct student and prospective student user interviews.
• Analyze your findings and recommendations.

It’s generally helpful to do a competitive shop alongside this process to help identify opportunities to test against. I can walk you through this.

The Power of Video Highlight Reels from Your Student Interviews

This is a bonus. As you host 1-on-1 student interviews or group interviews, be sure to record them. You can use Zoom and other similar tools to record these interviews. If you are doing them in person, you can use your cell phone to record the session. 

This highlight reel can become just as important to your organization as the student journey map. 

Be sure to get permission from your interviewees (have them sign a waiver), so you can take some highlights from each interview and put them together into a highlight video reel. 

You can also ask the students to complete a task on your website to record the students’ experiences going through that task. You can also capture their motives and aspirations while going through this exercise to get more authentic feedback. The student isn’t self-editing as much when they are a bit distracted by a task. 

Harness the power of video marketing to get more people in your organization to truly understand your prospective and current students. 

Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text.

If “a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video has to be worth at least 1.8 million words ,” according to McQuivey’s Forrester study.

You can use these highlight reels when onboarding new staff so they have a better understanding of your students and their challenges, which helps to increase empathy throughout your institution. 

The goal is to edit these reels in different ways since you’ve captured ample footage, accomplishing several different goals with the same research study. 

You can also set these studies up to help you figure out what programs to offer next. 

Because of these insights, your team will have visibility on how to serve your students better, improve your usability experience, and delight more students. 

Delighted students can become invested advocates who continue promoting your brand and enhancing your reputation. There is no better achievement than word-of-mouth referrals. 

Have You Heard of User Studies?

User studies are conducted 100% online; these user research studies focus on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback. User studies can be moderated and unmoderated. 

A researcher meets with participants virtually one-on-one to discuss topics or ask them to perform a certain task on your website. 

These thoughts and feelings are collected and used to inform website iterations. This can include iterations with your virtual orientation process, virtual career fair, online application, or virtual campus tour.

Get Feedback on Your Tuition, Academic Pages, Enrollment Application, and More

During your interviews, you can ask prospective students for their opinions about your tuition page. From this research, you should be able to improve your institutional tuition, leading to significant impacts on your conversion rates. 

You can ask interviewees their thoughts about your tuition calculator, and also get them to evaluate competitor tuition pages for a side-to-side comparison. 

You improve how you present your tuition by getting more feedback on students’ feelings as they see it, what they thought was confusing, and what they would like changed about it. eCommerce does this often. Students are consumers. They are deciding to enroll at your school (buy), and we owe them the best user experience possible. 

You can replicate this process for your academic pages, your enrollment application, your request for more information form(s), and the list goes on and on.

There is no end to how you can structure your student journey maps.

What Happens After Your Student Journey Map?

Act on the insights.

You will be able to refine your brand story and discover how to weave this throughout your prospective student’s experience with the goal of improving conversion rates. 

You will also be able to tweak your website’s usability to remove friction points since you can now identify them.

Let’s Start Fostering Empathy to Drive More Enrollments

Imagine how much empathy you can foster within your team and organization by sharing your prospective students’ thoughts, motives, aspirations, and friction points. 

This approach and practice creates a community aware of itself and all its moving parts. Awareness leads to understanding, understanding fosters connection, and connection breeds growth, and isn’t that the point of a worthwhile journey?

Once complete, your team will better understand your prospective student’s journey from awareness to consideration. You can tweak your website experience, messaging, communication strategy, and enrollment process to better align with what your students need and want. 

All these changes will help you increase conversion rates from visitor to lead and from lead to start, which will impact your cost-per-start (CPS) and yield. Yahoo!! Let’s start driving your institution more tuition revenue, so you continue offering those valuable services and impacting your community.  

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Student Journey Maps: What They Are & Why They Matter

Success is not a coincidence, and educational institutions understand this well, as their primary priority is the success of their students. They are constantly searching for new tools and methodologies to help them achieve this goal.

One of the methodologies that have gained significant popularity in recent years is a concept that is actually borrowed from the customer experience industry. We are referring to the Student Journey Map, an adapted version of the customer journey map focused on visualizing and better understanding all the steps in a student’s academic journey.

What is a Student Journey Map?

A Student Journey Map is a visual representation of a student’s experience from the moment they set foot on campus (or in a virtual classroom) until they proudly walk across the graduation stage. This map outlines key touchpoints, emotions, challenges, and milestones that shape a student’s voyage.

In simple terms, a Student Journey Map is like a storybook that narrates a student’s educational tale. It captures the highs and lows, the hurdles and victories, and the moments of growth and transformation. Just as a knight faces challenges on a heroic quest, students encounter various stages and transitions throughout their academic journey.

This tool has become a great ally for educational institutions due to its multiple benefits and applications. Below, we invite you to discover some of them:

Importance of Using a Student Experience Journey Map

Why should educational institutions invest their time and resources in creating and utilizing Student Journey Maps? The answer is quite simple: Because this methodology is easy to implement, and the benefits can be substantial.

Some of the most notable and specific benefits are:

• Understanding Student Needs: A well-crafted Student Journey Map delves into students’ needs, concerns, and aspirations. Institutions can tailor their support systems to address these challenges by pinpointing pain points.
• Enhancing Engagement: Engaged students are more likely to succeed. A Student Journey Map helps identify opportunities to enhance engagement through interactive learning methods, extracurricular activities, or personalized mentorship.
• Boosting Retention Rates: When students feel valued and supported, they’re more likely to stay the course and complete their education. A Student Journey Map enables institutions to design interventions that boost retention rates and keep students on track.
• Identifying Opportunities : By visually identifying the touchpoints, it becomes easier to pinpoint our strengths and weaknesses for taking action. Moreover, when a layer of information and data collection is added to this, it becomes possible to gauge student satisfaction levels at each point and focus our attention on critical situations.

The benefits are manifold, and if these have been sufficient to convince you to create one, we will now explain the general steps to achieve it.

Creating a Student Journey Map

Creating a Student Journey Map involves a blend of art and science, where data and empathy converge to create a holistic representation of the student experience. Each institution is unique and will have its own peculiarities and challenges to overcome; however, these steps cover the most general aspects to establish a solid foundation that allows us to create a definitive version of our student journey map.

Step 1 – Define Your ‘Student Personas’

Student personas are semi-fictional representations of your optimal student. They encompass general aspects that allow projections about the possible behavior and motivations of the individual.

They are used to have a clearer idea of who the message is directed towards or the actions to take to achieve a greater impact. Defining them before starting to create your Student Journey Map is crucial in academic institutions, as they are the central axis of this methodology.

Step 2 – Identify Touchpoints

Picture a map with landmarks indicating important destinations. Similarly, a Student Journey Map identifies touchpoints – key interactions between the student and the institution. These could range from the initial inquiry to orientation, class selection, exams, and more.

In each of these, it’s important to list possible actions and try to understand how the user would behave at each touchpoint. Eventually, these touchpoints become the central focuses to evaluate and take actions that allow for improving the entire journey.

Step 3 – Plot the Emotional Landscape

A student’s journey is not just about actions; it’s a rollercoaster of emotions. Use color-coded markers to illustrate emotional highs and lows. This paints a vivid picture of how students feel at different stages, helping educators tailor their support accordingly.

Conducting an NPS or similar evaluation will allow you to gauge students’ level of satisfaction or frustration at each interaction point. This will enable you to identify red and critical points for taking action on them.

Step 4 – Highlight Pain Points and Opportunities

Every journey has its roadblocks and shortcuts. Pinpoint pain points where students struggle or face challenges. Simultaneously, identify opportunities to provide assistance and create positive experiences. This step is crucial for enhancing the overall student journey.

Step 5 – Craft Interventions

Armed with insights, it’s time to design targeted interventions. From academic support to mental health resources, these interventions are the compass guiding students through potential rough patches and ensuring they remain on the path to success.

Create your own Student Journey Map!

As you may have noticed, these maps are excellent tools to empower institutions to make informed decisions, foster engagement, and pave the way for students to reach their full potential.

The best part is that it’s a methodology that’s easy to implement, and you likely already have many of the requirements to achieve it. That’s why we invite you to create your first student journey map using QuestionPro.

QuestionPro SuiteCX is a tool for creating journey maps in an easy and straightforward manner. You’ll find various templates and resources to help you achieve your goals. Additionally, you can integrate your data to understand better what’s happening with your students.

And that’s not all! QuestionPro offers a wide range of tools that can be used to ensure the satisfaction of your students and staff. 

Start exploring our tools and let the Student Journey Map be your guiding star, illuminating the way toward a brighter future for all learners.

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6 Steps to Map Higher Ed Student Journeys by Mirroring Customer Experience

Jul 31, 2020 • 5 minute read • ross lucivero, evp, product.

There was a time when the language of marketing and customer experience was frowned upon in higher education. So much so that one  former academic vice president said that “students are not customers; neither are their parents. We do not have customers. We must keep repeating this.” However, the higher education industry is seeing the benefits of customer experience tactics more familiar to those in the business world.

The attitude toward digital customer experiences (DCX) in higher ed is shifting. In a 2023 research study, we conducted with Vanson Bourne , 90% of respondents who work in the higher ed sector said DCX is important to their organization's success.

Colleges and universities are far from exempt from wider trends in consumer behavior, customer experience, and digital transformation. Applying the following six customer experience tactics for mapping higher ed student customer journeys will help set your institution apart from the others.

1. Segmenting the Student Body

Higher ed institutions can draw from B2C (business-to-consumer) practices when it comes to segmentation. In the same way a business segments its customers based on personas, a college can do the same with its student body across demographics, purchase history, psychographics, and more. Also, while creating equity and equality across all experiences is critical, the reality is that not all students will follow the same journey.

Creating sub-segments of your student body based on key personas will make journey mapping far more effective. The main idea is to target groups of people across student experience initiatives and make them feel personal. For example, the experiences for international students living on campus will differ from those of grad students who commute.

These segments should cover everything from pre-admission through graduation and career placement. The more granular you can make each segment, the more personalized you’ll be able to make student experiences.

2. Focusing on Phases of the Student Experience

Consumer-focused companies map experiences based on a multi-phase customer journey. The stages progress from awareness to interest, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. While these phases aren’t exactly mirroring higher ed phases, the principles still apply.

Once you segment your student body in a way that works for your institution, the next step is tracking all student interactions. Similar to the business customer journey, you can map these interactions to phases of the student experience. Your phases might include pre-admission, adapting to student life, coursework selection, career preparation, and alumni involvement.

Mapping these experiences into these phases will make spotting friction points your students may experience easier. For example, are you finding that new students are overwhelmed by the massive packets of information they get about adapting to life on campus? Maybe a  more interactive digital experience can replace some text-based information with engaging videos for specific segments of your student body.

3. Identifying All Student Touchpoints

Consumer-focused businesses need to know each customer touchpoint to ensure they’re  designing seamless experiences . These include brick-and-mortar stores, Amazon, e-commerce websites, social media, traditional advertising, digital advertising, and more. These are the places where businesses can interact with customers.

But higher ed is unique in that the student experience continues over the long term and typically has a majority of in-person interactions. Mapping the student journey means understanding all of the positive and negative interactions a person has with your institution. To make it easier to track, focus on these five specific areas:

• Academic Programs:  These programs encompass student interactions with their degree program and other projects or workshops. That could include communication for applications, the orientation process, ways students collaborate within a program, real-world preparation, and the process for applying for continuing education.
• Student Services:  These touchpoints revolve around academic support, including interactions with key departments like admissions, enrollment, financial counseling, advisement, career assistance, health, and research.
• Technology:  What technologies are you providing to support students? Technologies include any hardware, software, and infrastructure in place for in and out of the classroom. Understanding how you train students to use these systems, troubleshoot issues, and provide access to the technologies will be critical to overall experiences.
• Facilities:  How do campus facilities impact student experiences? Map the experiences that students have with classrooms, dining halls, healthcare facilities, libraries, residential housing, study spaces, sports facilities, and more.
• Community and Culture:  Your ability to create a sense of belonging through access to clubs/activities and leadership opportunities heavily influences the student experience. Map the student interactions while they engage in these activities, provide feedback about institutional programs, and participate in the campus community.

Having all of these student interactions mapped out gives you a high-level overview of the entire experience, helping you spot opportunities for improvement over time.

4. Collecting Student Feedback

In B2C environments, businesses can correlate sales numbers and return rates to issues with product experiences. But in higher ed, the vast array of interactions with students over such a long period makes it difficult to identify pain points and areas of strength on your own. Collecting feedback at every stage of the student journey is critical.

There’s no one-size-fits-all way to collect student feedback about experiences. However, following a specific event, running simple digital surveys across social media and on-site can give you quantitative insight into the student experience. Beyond that, you can run focus groups and interviews with your segments. Get a better idea of how students feel about experiences—both in the big picture and on a lower level with specific interactions.

Analyzing these insights will help you prioritize improvements to alleviate pain points. It will also help you double down on the initiatives that deliver great student experiences.

5. Turning Data Into a Story

All of the data in the world won’t help improve experiences if it’s not actionable. This idea is as true for higher education as it is for any consumer-focused business.

After you’ve collected data and feedback from students, find ways to display results in the most impactful ways possible. Create data visualizations that map feedback or pain points to the different phases of the student experience. This exercise will make it easier when collaborating with higher education leaders on the solutions.

There are all kinds of student journey map templates available online. However, try not to force your situation to fit a generic template. Whether you're using a template or building a student journey map, ensure it properly communicates your specific needs, pain points, and interactions.

6. Identifying Needs and Implementing Improvements

Student journey mapping is all about creating a system for feedback and continuous improvement. Journey mapping is an agile approach for supporting innovative student experiences and gives you the flexibility necessary to adapt to challenges as they arise.

Once the mapping processes are complete, you can start pulling in stakeholders from different areas of the institution to begin making improvements to student experiences. For example, having a documented list of student pain points will make it easier to interact with website designers to  improve digital experiences . And communicating specific pain points to administrative staff will make it easier to update processes and operations that are more efficient.

Designing Innovative Higher Ed Student Experiences

Journey mapping isn’t just for organizations in the business world. Applying these principles to higher ed can help make a difference in your ability to satisfy evolving student expectations, which increases overall performance for your college or university.

Student journey mapping gives you the framework to identify weaknesses in your experiences at every stage of interaction. But that’s just the first step. Finding innovative ways to address those weaknesses is the key to improving your institution.

Looking for new innovations to address your student or faculty experience? Get in touch to learn how Verndale can help.

5 Digital Trends That Will Transform Higher Education

Aug 02, 2019 • 4 minute read.

Using journey mapping to optimize the student experience

The path to a degree application is fluid, nuanced and increasingly complex. Competition is fierce, tactics are becoming more sophisticated and students are arguably harder to engage with traditional marketing activity.

Some universities are responding by mapping out the student journey in order to better optimize the application process and student experience. Read on to find out what it is, how you can use it to identify valuable strategic opportunities and the process to get there.

What is student journey mapping and why is it important

The student journey is the end-to-end sequence of all the interactions that student experiences throughout their connection with a university, from the first time they become aware of the institution, to undertaking their studies, graduating and continuing their learning and keeping in touch as an alumnus.

Inevitably, the focus along this journey is often the prospective student journey through to conversion. With 49 touchpoints in a typical education purchase journey, and the average time from initial awareness through to an inquiry being 36 days, it's no wonder institutions are reviewing the student enrolment process at a granular level.

Understanding prospective students' mentality is a good starting point of course, but marketing and recruitment teams are now often diving deeper into students' considerations, beliefs, obstacles and the options available to them to gain greater insights.

The more you can understand your prospective student's goals, the better. Are they excited, worried, frustrated, relaxed, stressed, trusting or skeptical? And how does this change through the application cycle?

This will also help you to clarify:

• How you can understand their mindset and help them to achieve their goals?
• What's unique about your institution and the way you offer your education services?
• How can you best serve students, and do so differently to competitors?

Further benefits of student journey mapping

Mapping out the student journeys provides an excellent framework to enable the marketing practices within university organizations to reach a higher level. When properly executed there are some major benefits.

• Breaking down silos: Customer journey mapping cuts across departments and breaks down silos. It brings a fresh perspective that breaks down the walls of faculties and departments to create value for students
• Institutions rightly pay attention to their internal product and the quality of content. Student journey mapping brings a focus to the external customer - students.
• A student-focused approach can enhance marketing and build a competitive advantage by driving new ways to convey the specific USPs of institutions in ways that resonate with students.

The key elements of a student journey mapping exercise

A detailed student journey exercise typically includes these elements. You can use these steps to understand and transform your institution's student experience.

• Personas: these are fictional characters used to describe different groups of prospective students in detail. We've all witnessed poorly researched and articulated personas. But when they're specific, well researched and crafted with specific detail such as demographic and psychographic information, they can provide a truly great foundation for student journey mapping. Audience groupings can also be useful here, for example, how the international student conversion journey plays out compared to domestic students or commuter students versus students using university accommodation, and mature students versus school leavers.
• Phases: these are the typical steps a student goes through in the process through to enrolment at your institution. We often see these cited as discovery, evaluation, application, enrolment, retention, and loyalty, but you can define your own specific stages relating to the conversion journey.
• Touchpoints: by this, we mean any point of contact that can be made between prospective students and the university, whether that be booking forms on the website, social media channels, a downloadable prospectus, a click to call moment, a campus visit, a live chat or a student ambassador interaction. A useful exercise here is mapping out the current student journey and documenting any 'pain' and 'love' points.
• Psychographic: It's important to explore the mindsets of prospective students through their enrolment journey. Research can play a part here in terms of uncovering what they're thinking and feeling as they move through the process.
• Improvement opportunities: Once you've completed the steps above, you can map the phases to processes and systems to build up a full picture. This enables you to identify gaps and areas for improvement as well as ways to improve conversion.

The student perspective on the journey to enrolment

Every journey mapping exercise should start with customers, in this case, students. Sitting down with students you can begin brainstorming each of these elements in detail. This can work well in a semi-structured way, working with the topic areas but allowing the conversations and ideas to flow naturally. As you step through this activity you can pin down important insights directly against specific touchpoints

Whatever you do you mustn't explain away problems or avoid writing them on the map. You should capture everything, warts and all, because an issue that you avoid now may be the root cause of further problems later in the journey.

Also remember that even if you know the cause of a problem, your students may not. They don't see all the complexities of enrolment or registration and their experience may be explained in a raw and personal format that needs translating to the process you're mapping.

The university perspective on the journey to enrolment

Once you have documented the insights from students you can now think about the journey from the point of view of your institution. At this stage, you should consult admissions, marketing and digital teams, people involved in open days, academics and your leadership team. You should carry out workshops with staff, faculty and existing students including student ambassadors to further understand the student journey.

Through this dialogue, you can also build up a picture to understand which systems and which processes influence and define the various touchpoints.

This can be a daunting task but breaking down the journey into each phase and following the data paths and systems involved will make the activity much more manageable.

Putting the student at the center

A definitive process for reshaping the student experience, student journey mapping enables university teams to draw unique insights from the perspective of their key audience.

Rooted in created a user-centric experience, the concept can be an excellent foundation for projects. From changing the way that students are recruited to the ways dons are engaged, the mapping process can help to nurture good business practices and bring about real change.

Leading universities worldwide already have student journey mapping initiatives up and running.  Deakin University in Australia, for example, underwent a digital transformation to enhance the student experience. They developed a student journey that was digitally enabled with innovative mobile apps and cloud-based learning, which has been recognized for its innovation and impact.

In recent times, we have heard a lot of universities say that they are putting the 'student at the heart of what we do' and the 'student experience' has become a Key Performance Indicator for some.

By focusing on the student and their needs you can very quickly qualify ideas and potential projects based on whether or not they improve or degrade the student experience.

The student experience is paramount and now crucial to raise enrolment numbers. Implemented effectively, it can attract students, improve onboarding, enrich student life, provide a 360-degree view of the student and deliver effective alumni engagement.

Student journey mapping can't offer a solution to all the challenges facing universities, but it can be an important foundation behind the marketing that will help move innovative institutions forward.

Student Journey Mapping

What is student journey mapping.

Student Journey Mapping is the process of analyzing the student experience (or a phase of it) by collecting first-hand data from students directly.  It allows for campus administrators to draw unique insights from the perspective of their key audience.

Laurentian University Undergraduate Prospective Student Journey

How is Student Journey Mapping used?

Rooted in creating a student-centric experience, the concept of User Journey Mapping (or Student Journey Mapping) can be a cornerstone for decision making in higher education.  From changing the way in which students are recruited to the way donors are engaged, the Student Journey Mapping process can help good business practices evolve into great ones.

How to use Student Journey Mapping?

Having gone through this process with over a dozen institutions, I’d like to share my successes and failures in order to help you in preparing your own Student Journey Mapping process. In this workshop we will:

– Understand the fit of a Journey Map – Discuss audience identification – Identify the data collection process – Learn to prioritize findings into an action plan

This process will help you understand how to bring together data from both administrative and student-based interviews (surveys, focus groups, 1-on-1 interviews and analytics), how to turn this data into information, and finally, how to develop that into a document that your organization will understand. You will leave this session with the framework to begin your own student journey mapping exercise that will help you to use data to drive your decisions. When executed correctly, these Student Journey Maps can allow you to make student centric decisions that are driven by data.

If you’re interested in this topic, hear more about it through a discussion I had with Stephen App  of the Hashtag Higher Ed Podcast from eCity Interactive titled “X Marks the Spot: Understanding Student Journey Mapping in Higher Education” .

Are you interested in journey mapping your student experience? I’d love to help by either running the process, advising you throughout the process with resources or simply answering your questions.

Send me a note, read more about student journey mapping.

Presentation delivered to the 220 attendees of the 2017 Strategic Enrolment Management Forum in Toronto. 

Testimonial from Adam Smith, Marketing Manager at OzTREKK

“When I saw JP present on Student Journey Mapping at the SEMM conference, I knew it was a project that would help us further develop and document our knowledge of our students.  As an agency for our university partners, we already work closely with our students and hear their concerns directly every day.  What JP did for us with his journey mapping process was to deepen that understanding by effectively and efficiently drawing in perspectives from across the organization in a fun way that motivated the team, rather than seeming like an added work obligation.  JP then validated these findings against student perspectives using survey data and phone interviews to produce a journey map that highlighted the activities our students undertake and all of their emotions/thinking through these steps through inquiring, applying, accepting their offer, and preparing to start in their program.  We came away with a journey map that clearly identifies the most significant barriers that our students face, allowing us to focus projects around goals to alleviate these barriers.  Overall it’s made everybody more confident in the work they’re doing and provides a confident basis for direction in the org, and all within tight project timelines.  Thanks JP!”

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Online student customer journey map (+ free template)

The culture of upskilling and reskilling nudges workers and companies to have their finger on the pulse of new technologies and approaches. It also boosts the growth of online courses, training events, and educational webinars.

For instance, over 20 million new learners came to Coursera in 2021.   

However, the online education industry is a battlefield. There are many competitors there, including the Ivy League players such as Yale and Harvard. 

Educational institutions and businesses employ a variety of methods to attract new students. Some use time-tested marketing techniques, such as discount coupons. Others go further to in-depth analysis to reveal student needs, expectations, goals, and jobs to be done. The latter use student customer personas and journey mapping as a reliable method to analyze their educational programs in terms of learners' demands. 

Both personas and maps are based on the data obtained from customer surveys, interviews, and open market research. It turns mapping into a super helpful tool for finding new business opportunities and better understanding your target audience.

If you want to apply this approach and create a student customer journey map for your business, follow these instructions.

• 1 Step 1: Identify student personas
• 2 Step 2: Determine where a student journey begins and ends
• 3 Step 3: Describe the details of a student journey
• 4 Step 4: Let the feelings flow
• 5 Step 5: Put the insights into action
• 6 Step 6: Get back with new ideas
• 7 A ready-to-go student customer journey map template

Step 1: Identify student personas

You can’t start creating a customer journey map for every student on the planet. Primarily, determine who your target audience covers. Break these people into groups according to their behavior, interests, goals, etc. Here are your personas . 

Come up with a name for each persona you describe. Additionally, you can use fictional photos to bring your personas to life. It enables you to think of your customer segments as real people (they really are).

Now add all the information that makes each persona stand out from the crowd: skills, backgrounds, frustrations, motivations, etc. Use your analytics and stats to get it right. 

Besides, you can turn to discoveries from education-related research. For instance, the Pearson and The Harris Poll survey describes five types of learners ages 14-40:

• Traditional (25%);
• Hobby (24%);
• Career (19%);
• Reluctant (17%);
• Skeptical (15%).

Step 2: Determine where a student journey begins and ends

Now, you can think about the scope of a journey your personas take. It is up to you to build an end-to-end journey or map out just some part of it, such as the learning process.  

Say the first option works best for you, then you need to break down the journey(s) stage by stage . 

As a quick point, you can create several maps for different personas. It will get you a deeper understanding of your target groups.

Here is how the sequence of stages of a student customer journey map might look like: 

• Consideration;
• Registration;
• Assessment;
• Graduation;

However, the final number of stages your student customer journey map includes will depend on your case. 

Step 3: Describe the details of a student journey

Finally, it is about time to add more details to each stage of your map. 

Here are some map sections to be included:

• Persona’s goals—what a student persona wants to achieve. Being on the same page with your customers helps you adjust your offerings and improve communication. For example, your students might need PayPal as a payment option when they pay for a course or want to message you via Live Chat when they are at the consideration stage. 

Pro tip: Think of questions your students may have during the journey. It enables you to pinpoint their goals and intentions.

• Processes—what the persona does to reach their goals. Describe how they act at each stage of their journey. For example, you can detail how a student pays for a course via a credit card or searches for feedback from other students on the web. 
• Channels—how a student communicates with you. This part of your map details the medium student personas use to interact with your institution (e.g., via browser, email, phone). Analyzing channels also helps you detect touchpoints —all occasions when the interactions between your students and institution happen. For example, they visit your website, apply for your course via the web form, ask a question via email, etc.  
• Problems—what obstacles a student encounters through the journey. At the research stage, your students may need more information on your educational programs, or they may want more personal consultations with a tutor during the learning process. Map it out to reveal all points causing problems!
• Ideas and opportunities — what you can do to improve the student experience. This section on the map is crucial for your action plans and prioritizing. It includes the solutions to problems you have detected earlier. By the way, it is the best moment to invite your teammates to join the mapping initiative and work on a problem together during ideation workshops.  

Step 4: Let the feelings flow

When you believe your students are rational people, you are wrong. Our emotions influence decision-making processes because we are humans, after all. And you cannot lose sight of it when mapping. 

For this reason, it is also a great idea to include an experience graph to your student customer journey map.

How can you benefit from depicting customer emotions? 

First, it gets you a better understanding of how your personas feel at different stages. Disappointed people tend not to show brand loyalty or convert into your regular customers. So, you need to find and reveal anything that upsets or angers them.   

Second, treating them as real people helps you put yourself into your student’s shoes and understand how you can improve their experience with your institution.

Third, an experience graph is more visible than the conversion rate or the number of applicants. Not all your colleagues grasp the language of statistics and metrics at a glance. With the emoticon graph, it will be easier for your staff to perceive your students' problems and needs. 

Step 5: Put the insights into action

When your journey is finished, it’s about time to act on the map! At the end of the day, you didn't make it out of curiosity, did you? Discuss all discoveries with your team during a student customer journey map presentation . It helps prioritize what you need to do first and develop an action plan.

Step 6: Get back with new ideas

For journey maps to be helpful for your business, they should keep updated. That is why it is a great idea to revise them regularly. 

There are many occasions when it makes sense to do it:

• kicking off a new course;
• expanding your business geographically;
• having many complaints about your offerings;
• testing some hypotheses to improve customer experience;
• changing something in your processes: adding new payment options, creating a page on a social platform that is gaining momentum, etc.  

Updating your map can be a personal or a teamwork initiative. The thing to keep in mind is to include mapping in your regular marketing toolkit. Otherwise, it could all come down to a waste of time.

A ready-to-go student customer journey map template

Let’s turn all this theory into practice! 

Since mapping is a fascinating yet quite complicated activity, you need something to inspire and guide you. For example, here is a ready-to-use template:

It embraces the experience of Chloe Cote, a fictional head of sales at an insurance company who wants to grow her consulting business. For this reason, she searches for suitable training options for online business courses. 

Take a look at her end-to-end journey from the Awareness to the Feedback stage.   

Grab a free template to adjust and use at your educational institution!  

P.S. Do you want to learn the journey of a real online student? Check out our blog post about transitioning to CX , or give a use case for creating a student journey map a look.

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Case study: student journey mapping

This case study reviews the use of journey mapping for improving retention rates at a US university. As the work was completed by students graduating into the healthcare field, it also showed how service design methods can help people working in healthcare to apply creative problem solving and a more user-centric approach in their daily work.

Connecting to healthcare

Patient journey mapping can help fulfill healthcare’s increased focus on delivering patient-centered care.

Healthcare is sometimes a little behind the times and not known for being a very innovative industry. The industry is starting to adopt a patient-centric view when creating services and thus journey mapping can help students and providers to adopt this method and tools in their future daily work within the healthcare system. Frank Rowe

These students will receive their graduate degrees and start their first full-time jobs in the healthcare industry. They have learned that journey mapping is a powerful way to improve other people’s experiences, and they can apply this to their future patients, healthcare providers, and the broader healthcare community. By putting themselves in the shoes of others, they will be able to better understand patient fears and expectations, and thus insert empathy into an otherwise processual structure.

Students in their feedback appreciated the professors insight in the field, the practical application of the course and the ability to learn critical thinking.

Problem statement and goal

Frank Roewe is an adjunct professor in a graduate program at a US university, where he teaches a graduate-level course on strategic planning, organizational effectiveness and leadership in healthcare. He’s also the founder of Cecond Opinion, a management consulting and executive coaching firm based in suburban Philadelphia.

University student retention is an issue among US universities. College administrators aim at keeping graduation rates high to decrease the loss in tuition revenue from students. This can be done by minimizing dropout rates and transfer rates to other institutions. Frank’s university faces similar problems. Given the scope and size of this challenge, their strategic plan focuses on keeping student dropouts and transfers low (Herzlinger, R., Ramaswamy, V.K., & Schulman, K.A. (2014). Bridging Health Care’s Innovation-Education Gap. Harvard Business Review).

Project setup

Frank’s course included 13 graduate students studying Public Health. Most of them were master-level students, and one was a doctoral student. They were all close to graduation and his course was a compulsory capstone course. Together with the University’s strategic planning department, Frank focused on three specific areas related to student drop-outs during the strategic planning and journey mapping exercise: Curriculum, Financial, and Social.

A main challenge surfaced in this session is that courses are relatively short at 10 weeks per term, whereas most US universities operate on 16-week terms. As a result, courses move quickly and some students have difficulty keeping up with the workload. In addition to Curriculum and Financial challenges, some at-risk students struggle with Social and adjustment problems, like having difficulties with roommates or feeling homesick.

After an introduction to strategic planning and journey mapping, Frank divided his students into 3 teams of 3 to 4 students each. Each team focused on a specific part of the strategic problem: Curriculum, Financial, or Social.

First, each team of students researched various elements of their specific strategic problem area. They interviewed both current students and former students who had dropped out, for their insights into drop-out risks. They also reviewed University statistics, data and reports provided by the strategic planning office, and applied strategic planning tools to this information, completing a SWOT analysis, an action plan, and the “Keep, Stop, Start” framework. Finally, they created a dashboard with KPIs for measuring improvements.

Applying the “Keep, Stop, Start” framework allowed the students to assess what was working or not working with the existing strategic plan.

Keep Keep a comprehensive college-wide orientation, because data proved that this program had enhanced student’s preparation for beginning the quarter based curriculum. They advised to transfer this program to all other colleges within the university and to start discussions regarding their own college policy to enhance their student’s preparedness.

‍ Stop Stop mandating midterm exams to be held during week 5, as it was unfeasible to mandate a standard midterm for each course. As each professor has a unique course calendar it would be difficult to obtain compliance. Furthermore requiring all midterms at week 5 would place a much larger burden on students and would not solve the issue of reducing stress or improving academic success.

‍ Start Start a mandatory meeting with an advisor when a student fails midterm exams. This could increase the students feeling of preparedness and help maintain a strong relationship, while at the same time aiding the student in recuperating their grades.

Strategic planning & journey mapping

Students were then introduced to various methods and tools to create strategic plans and customer journey maps. They learned that there is not one way to create a strategic plan or a journey map; many models and methodologies work, but the key is to use the approach that will ensure the greatest likelihood of success.

What matters is the thinking and assumptions that go into the students’ strategic plans and journey maps. Their logic and assumptions must be sound, I reminded them of this point frequently. But in addition, they also needed to ‘avoid rabbit holes’ by fixing problems that had little positive impact on the strategic problem they’re addressing (declining graduation rates). Thirdly, we talked a lot about the value of keeping it simple, clear, and easy for others to understand. The first challenge for the students was that they will never have all the necessary information to understand the current situation, so they will need to work with a certain degree – as high as 40% or more – of uncertainty. The second challenge was to make sure that they remained focused on the aspect of their strategic problem in a way that they would have the biggest outcome. And the third challenge was to focus on successfully implementing the strategic plan. We know from practise that this is one main problem with strategic plans. They get developed, but rarely implemented in a way that generates the desired outcomes. Frank Roewe

For the journey mapping exercise, the teams created individual personas of at-risk students. The personas included both demographic and psychographic details. The three personas correlated to the three reasons students are at higher risk of dropping out: Curriculum, Financial, and Social. Each journey map was developed based on 6 to 8 student touchpoints and included a timeline with various steps that a persona might follow. In addition, each journey map had a seminal or “make or break” touchpoint, which were moments that matter most in the student journey and where a decision to drop out was likely made.

Students then created their journey map, focusing on the biggest challenges within the framework of the three key areas. They worked offline in small teams using colored sticky notes, which allowed them to think through various steps, put them on the wall, cluster them and find similarities and sequences. As students themselves, course participants could build on their own experiences and those of their colleagues and friends.

In week 9, students presented their strategic plans. In week 10 – the final week of class – they provided an update of their strategic plan’s progress, and presented their personas and journey maps. They tied action plans to their journey maps, which included touchpoints based on their research.

The student journey map made the strategic plan come alive. Walking in the shoes of the personas is a great way to ensure the strategic plan is deployed with focus and energy. Frank Rowe

Students digitized their journey maps with Smaply , providing them with a professional resource to share with their classmates and professor. Students could also reference their Smaply journey maps during job interviews to demonstrate their familiarity with the creative process of customer journey mapping and Smaply.

Jim is a freshman with poor time management and organizational skills. He’s smart but has difficulty communicating regularly with professors and turning in assignments on time. He has never been a strong student, perhaps because he prioritizes social life over schoolwork. Jim was happy to be accepted at the university, but once he started the program, he had difficulty keeping up with the rapid pace. The term started quickly, and he has to work hard to attend all classes, do his homework, and enjoy his social life. Even though he attended a new student orientation meeting, he did not find it useful and has become frustrated. Jim feels lost and does not know how to manage his workload, especially after failing his first midterm exam. This was the seminal touchpoint for Jim, and at this precise point in time Jim is at greatest risk of dropping out of school.

Findings & implementation for student team focused on curriculum

In their ideation sessions, students became aware of different problems in the student experience related to the 10-week term as a contributing factor to drop out rates. As a result of their findings, they recommended:

1. Transition to the quarter system from high school

The university follows an atypical academic year. While most US schools are semester based, this school organizes its academic year in 4 quarters (fall, winter, spring, summer), at 10 weeks each. Many students coming from high school and other colleges are not used to this.

The team realized that the quarter system is a key challenge because students did not realize how quickly 10 weeks pass compared to their high school terms, which operate on 16-week semesters. They found that the university did not offer sufficient assistance with transition to the quarter schedule. They also found that once at-risk students slip behind, it’s much harder for them to keep up with the workload. Recovering from poor mid-term grades in a 10-week term is difficult.

One suggestion for improvement proposed by the project team was to better prepare students for what is in front of them. The current orientation provides minimal information regarding curriculum structure and time management, but students need to understand that university is different from high school, and quarters are different from semesters. The university needs to develop a more comprehensive student orientation session to better prepare students for success in a quarter based school. This would help increase student’s awareness for the transition into the quarter system.

2. Introduce fixed consultation and increase the number of available advisors

Students did not have enough time to communicate with professors, and there was no established time to meet advisors prior to classes. There was also an insufficient number of student advisors. For example, the team learned that in one college at the university, there were only 2 student advisors for over 1,000 undergraduate students. The team suggested that professors should establish office hours so that students could easily schedule a conversation if they need to. In addition, they recommended that colleges investigate a more favourable student-to-advisor ratio to ensure students have the peer support they need to succeed.

KPI preparation

Students developed several KPIs to align to their strategic priorities and to track progress within their journey maps. For instance, students introduced a pre- and post-change survey for measuring the number of students who felt prepared for the quarter system. While the pre-survey takes place immediately following the orientation itself, the post-survey is held at week 10 of the first quarter. Students also measured the percentage of professors that hold midterms during the quarter’s midpoint (week 5) in order to understand variability before attempting to standardize the exam schedules throughout the school.

One of the biggest challenges within strategic planning is the actual implementation of the plan. There are various reasons organizations do not succeed in putting the plan into action. This can include poor communication and dissemination of the plan to all levels of the organization, inadequate support from leadership, and insufficient resources. A key objective of the course was to show how journey mapping and strategic planning work together to help organizations be more successful. By having a one-page journey map, the main focus areas of the strategic plan can easily be communicated to employees at all levels of the organization. A journey map helps employees understand why their activities and goals matter, and how their actions positively impact the organization’s strategic priorities. Students learned that by combining a journey map with their strategic plan they could increase the impact of their strategic plan.

By working on reducing drop-out rates, students learned how to address a real-world problem with tools that can be transferred to other challenges in other sectors, such as in the healthcare sector, where they will be working during their careers. They were also introduced to journey mapping, where they could see how Service Design tools can help clarify alignment and reinforce organizational focus to effectively address strategic priorities.

Creating a journey map allowed students to understand the different interactions that students have over time, through various channels, and with all their emotional ups and downs. Journey mapping helped students to understand the underlying causes of the problem related to Curriculum, how their “student customers” feel about it, and select the best actions for addressing this strategic problem.

Goal of the project: Increasing retention rates at a US university

‍ Project duration: Fall 2019

‍ Number of workshop participants: 13

‍ Number of journey maps created: 4

‍ Number of personas created: 4

And now, what's next?

This project team has been using Smaply to understand and manage student experience, using student journey maps and personas.

Smaply is available for free – go ahead and create your own CX insights hub!

Birgit Bosio

Birgit has worked in the field of services and tourism for over 10 years. After being responsible for market research at the Tyrolean Tourism Board she also works for MCI Management Center Innsbruck as a researcher.

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Passion meets purpose: UC grad shares her path to law school

Darwin t. turner scholar credits cohort, support with success.

Inspired by personal experience with her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s battle, Janice Rotich had planned to study neuroscience in the University of Cincinnati’s College of Arts and Sciences. 

Janice Rotich speaks at the Darwin T. Turner Scholars Program end of year ceremony. Photo/Provided

But before she started her freshman year, Rotich was offered financial support through UC’s Darwin T. Turner Scholarship program. Named for the first African American student who, at the age of 16, was the youngest person to graduate from UC, the program offers not only scholarships but a community of scholars who support one another.

"Being an out-of-state student from Texas, I was desperate to find a university that would provide me with a community that I could lean on," Rotich said. "At a ceremony hosted by the Darwin T. Turner Scholarship team, I witnessed the love, joy, and pride that came with being in the Turner Scholar Family. I committed to UC that night."

Choosing UC for its unique offering of political science and the supportive Darwin T. Turner team, Rotich found her home away from home, and found her calling in activism and the legal profession.

Finding community, opportunity

During her undergraduate studies, Rotich bloomed through her academics and extracurricular interests. 

Rotich alongside members of the Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc. Photo/Provided

She became a member of the Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc.; assumed the role of senator at-large in student government; served as a planning committee member for the Black Feminist Symposium; chaired the Student Advisory Council for the School of Public & International Affairs; and contributed as a student recruitment and retention ambassador for the Department of Africana Studies. 

“The people, resources and opportunities I’ve met at UC have changed my life for the better,” she says. “I know that my story would not be the same had I ended up at another university.”

Next stop: grad school

Introduced to the 4+1 program, in which students can complete a master's degree in just five years, Rotich recognized the program as the perfect complement to her future in public interest law. 

Beginning classes during her senior year, she seamlessly integrated into the Master’s in Public Administration cohort, emphasizing the warmth and support she felt among her classmates. 

I always felt the love and support of every one of my classmates. I truly could not have asked for a better cohort.

Janice Rotich UC College of Arts and Sciences graduate

Rotich said that alongside completing coursework, her greatest accomplishment as a grad student was being the youngest speaker at the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration 2023 Annual Conference, representing UC and MPA students nationwide on a panel discussing "Institutionalized DEIJ Backlash."

The panel emphasized a discourse on navigating academia for individuals with marginalized identities, exploring strategies to foster a more inclusive learning environment for members of marginalized communities. 

Rotich emphasizes the instrumental role of mentors in shaping her journey, particularly professor Lauren Forbes and Brandi Elliott, Executive Director of Identity and Inclusion UC’s Steger Student Life Center. Their belief in her academic abilities led to her appointment to represent UC, SPIA, and MPA students nationwide for the NASPAA panel. 

Experience outside the classroom

Rotich alongside fellow internship peers at the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Photo/Provided

Rotich's diverse range of internship experiences further compliments her commitment to her chosen path.

From working with the U.S. House of Representatives to the Summer Work Experience in Law program and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, each experience has shaped her understanding of politics and advocacy. Notably, her time with the mayor's office in Cincinnati added a layer of realism to her academic journey, she said.

Looking to the future

Rotich in regalia. Photo/Provided

As a graduate assistant at the Taft Research Center, Rotich continues to apply her skills in real-world settings, building on the foundations laid during her undergraduate and master's studies. 

Next stop: the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a private, ivy-league university, where she has committed to pursue her law degree this fall.

Featured image at top: Jan at the Darwin T. Turner Scholarship End of Year Ceremony. Janice Rotich, second row, third from left. Photo/Provided

By Abbey Willmann

Graduate Assistant , A&S Marketing and Communication

[email protected]

• School of Public and International Affairs
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Student Spotlight

Uhlc student mackay shares journey from decorated green beret to law school.

March 5, 2024 – Roger Mackay served in the army as a Green Beret for almost a decade and received the Bronze Star. After his military service, he decided to pursue a career as an attorney and enrolled in law school.  

Mackay is a 2L who transferred to UHLC last fall 2023. He encourages law students to not compare themselves to others and instead focus on their own goals and achievements.

Mackay will be working with Gray Reed as a summer associate this year.

Roger Mackay, University of Houston Law Center 2L

What led you to pursue a legal education at UHLC?

I attended the University of Texas at San Antonio for my undergrad before transferring to the University of Houston because it was closer to home. I dropped out of the University of Houston in 2010 to join the military and spent about 10 years in the army as a Green Beret. I had my first daughter right before a deployment to Afghanistan. Having my first kid changed my whole perspective. While I was on a deployment, I decided to pursue other opportunities and I started developing a plan and ultimately decided to go to law school.

I re-enlisted in the army for three years and pursued a business degree and I took the LSAT once. I then left the army and applied to law schools and UHLC was where I really wanted to come. However, I didn’t get into UHLC in the first round, and I ended up retaking the LSAT. I attended another law school, and while I had a great time at that law school, there were so many reasons why I wanted to come to UHLC.

I transferred schools since my goal was always to get to UHLC. There are just so many benefits to coming to a school like UHLC. In Houston, UHLC is arguably the best law school, there are so many courses offered here, the legal market here is great and UHLC has good job prospects for their graduates of course.

I also attended UH back in 2010 and it was kind of like an unfinished business type thing. I wanted to finish what I started coming here for undergrad and law school would be even better to graduate from.

In what ways did your experience as a Green Beret help in law school?

Being a Green Beret takes a lot of planning and commitment, but also being able to adapt. Discipline and the ability to adapt to the walls that come up in front of you and being able to get around those are probably some of the biggest things that I learned throughout my time in the military.

Getting into law school is so hard, it takes a lot of planning, commitment, and dedication. Because when you decide that you want to do something, it’s easy to find reasons not to do it.

You have to be able to adapt to whatever happens on the fly. No matter how detailed a plan you make, something can always happen that derails it, and you have to adapt.

What were some of your favorite professors/memories here?

I’ve been here for a semester and two weeks now but there’s plenty of memories already. Law school is full of memories from day one. You go through 1L and you’re in your section, so everybody gets close, you’re all going through this new experience together. But for transfers, that whole process starts over. I didn’t feel like I was starting over at UHLC, it’s been great.  

My first semester I took a Trial Advocacy for Non-Litigators class where we had to do two trials. The midterm was the bench trial, and the final exam was a full-blown jury trial at the courthouse in Harris County so that was a great experience.

What does your upcoming work with Gray Reed mean to you?

It really is a dream come true, especially at a firm like Gray Reed. After going through the interview process, meeting people from Gray Reed through the interview process, it just felt perfect. And when they offered me the position, I didn’t even have to think about it. I accepted immediately and it seems perfect really and I can’t wait to get started this summer with Gray Reed.

What is one valuable lesson you learned at UHLC?

Law school is so competitive just by its nature, that it’s easy to compare yourself to other people.

Just remember that everybody’s path is different. Don’t get discouraged by looking at other people, don’t let other people’s failures or achievements get in the way of you pursuing your goals.

What advice do you have for individuals considering law school?

If someone wants to go to law school, they must understand that it starts when you decide you want to go and you must be prepared to put in the amount of time, effort, and energy you're willing to put in what you hope to get out of it.

If you want to do something, look for ways to do it. Don’t focus on reasons why you shouldn’t do something, consider them but don’t let them control you.

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2024 Match Day Excitement and Results!

March 20, 2024 by [email protected]

Residency Match Day is an annual, nationwide event, when students find out where they will spend the next 3-7 years of their lives. It’s a high stakes day with a lot of pressure—the culmination of a year of preparing for and applying to residency—and by the time Match Week comes around, the results are out of the student’s hands.

Congratulations to the MD Class of 2024 who made it through four years of intensive classes, rigorous clinical experiences, and the high-pressure residency application season. In the fall, they began applying to residency programs and interviewed throughout the winter. The students then ranked their choices for residency training in order of preference. In turn, residency programs ranked their choices of students.  A computerized mathematical algorithm then matches applicants with programs. Placement details were announced at noon EDT on Friday, March 15, Match Day. View the complete Match Results here .

Now the Class of 2024 enters the next exciting phase of their medical career: residency! Depending on their program, new residents generally begin their training in early July. At UVA, students get a world-class medical education that fully prepares them for the challenges and rigors of residency training.

Enjoy these photos of our graduating medical students gathering with classmates, family members and mentors to open the envelopes revealing the next step in their careers. Watch the complete recording of the Match Day Ceremony here.   

Photos by Coe Sweet.

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Watch CBS News

University of Missouri student missing 4 days after being kicked out of Nashville bar

By Emily Mae Czachor

March 12, 2024 / 1:03 PM EDT / CBS News

Nashville police are searching for a University of Missouri student who went missing on Friday, after last being seen at a downtown bar in the Tennessee city. Riley Strain, a 22-year-old senior at Mizzou, was visiting Nashville for the weekend and disappeared after he and his friends were kicked out of the bar that night, CBS affiliate  WTVF  reported.

One of Strain's friends, identified by his first name, Brayden, told the news station that he tried looking for Strain in the immediate aftermath of his disappearance. Officials said that Brayden also attempted to find Strain using the locations feature on Snapchat but was unable to see his friend in the area most recently reported by the app at that time, according to WTVF. 

Calls made out to Strain's cellphone went to voicemail after he went missing, and a police search of the area around a cell tower where Strain's phone last pinged was not successful, either. The area where his phone pinged is less than two miles from the bar in downtown Nashville where he was last seen.

Strain is 6 feet 5 inches tall with blue eyes and light brown hair, according to a description released by the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department. Police shared two photos of the missing student along with their description and noted in social media posts shared Monday and Tuesday that officers were continuing to search for him.

Nashville police released video footage on Tuesday that showed Strain with a small group crossing 1st Avenue to Gay Street, they said. That intersection is several blocks from the bar. Strain is seen in the footage wearing a brown button-up shirt with darker sleeves and a matching dark front pocket.

Detectives today continue to pursue tips & investigative leads concerning missing person Riley Strain, 22. Strain, wearing a 2-tone shirt, is seen in this video crossing 1st Ave N to Gay St (right to left), at 9:47 p.m. Fri. Have info about him? Plz 📞 615-742-7463. pic.twitter.com/fE86dlqeOC — Metro Nashville PD (@MNPDNashville) March 12, 2024

Detectives on foot searched the downtown area where Strain was last seen on Monday, while helicopters probed the area overhead, Nashville police  said  in an additional update shared that evening on social media. The helicopter search included the nearby riverbank, but none of the efforts located Strain.

"The investigation as to his whereabouts is active," police said in that update.

Strain was last seen at 9:52 p.m. Friday on Gay St. after drinking downtown. An MNPD helicopter searched that area today, including the riverbank. Detectives on the ground also searched, but to no avail. The investigation as to his whereabouts is active. https://t.co/gyhVeJo0Wh — Metro Nashville PD (@MNPDNashville) March 11, 2024

Strain's parents drove from Springfield, Missouri, to Nashville when they learned he was missing, WTVF reported. His mother, Michelle Whiteid, told the station on Monday that she and her son normally talk daily.

"I just need to know where my son is," Whiteid told WTVF. "We talk every day, multiple times a day, this is the longest I've ever gone without talking to him. It's devastating — I just want to find him and hug him."

• Missing Person

Emily Mae Czachor is a reporter and news editor at CBSNews.com. She covers breaking news, often focusing on crime and extreme weather. Emily Mae has previously written for outlets including the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed and Newsweek.

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School of Nursing Summer Course Scholarship Application

Current first year nursing students who are planning to enroll in nursing summer courses are encouraged to apply for The School of Nursing Summer Course Scholarship. The scholarship application will open April 1, 2024, with a priority date for scholarship application submission of April 15, 2024.

Students planning on enrolling in the following summer nursing courses can submit their application through the Wisconsin Scholarship Hub (WiSH):

• N105: Healthcare Systems: Interdisciplinary Approach
• N470: School Nursing in the Context of Community Health Practice
• N512: Functional Health & Lifestyle
• N513: Introduction to Relaxation: Body, Mind, & Spirit

Questions? Please reach out to the School of Nursing Scholarship Team: [email protected]

This post was authored by Judy Christensen on 03/14/2024.