Remember life before apps? Driving to the bank to deposit a check only to find it’s closed. Placing a pickup order on the phone while your family shouts their requests. Signing and scanning documents, wrangling files, then sending (insecurely) by email.

From DocuSign to DoorDash our lives have been transformed by apps that are continuously optimized so we find life without them impossible. It’s what software companies call “stickiness.”

College and university students live pre-app lives — at least when it comes to things like registering for classes, staying on top of financial aid deadlines, and finding graduation requirements.

The mostly in-person labyrinth students navigate to find useful information and get things done is more than inconvenient. It hinders academic success and can be the tipping point for students who doubt the worth of a certificate or degree. Must everything be so hard? I don’t have time to study let alone print and submit forms. Should I just drop out?

Take for example Santos Enrique Camara, a former student at Shoreline Community College in Washington State who finished high school with a 4.0 grade-point average. He told The Hechinger Report that he quickly felt lost when he started at Shoreline, and ultimately dropped out.

“It’s like a weird maze…You need help with your classes and financial aid? Well, here, take a number and run from office to office and see if you can figure it out.”

Four-year college students also find the first year the most critical in terms of staying enrolled. 

Twenty-three percent of all first-time, full-time freshmen dropped out of college between the fall semesters of 2021 and 2022, for example.

A lack of information and insufficient advising has serious consequences.

The Conversation found that “about 24% of former [community college] students stopped going to school in part because they were unsure about which courses to take next.” 

“Many community college students say they do not know what they need to do in order to graduate. They also say their academic advising is limited or impersonal.”

It’s not that higher education institutions want to make students’ lives more complicated than they ought to be.

One-stop-shop student service models are popular and successful. But they usually lack a technological backbone. Systems don’t talk with each other. Students need multiple logins and have to go to multiple sites or apps. And because staff and faculty rightfully don’t want to work 12-hour days and night shifts, it’s impractical to offer students 24/7 assistance.

That’s a thing of the past.

Artificial intelligence is giving students a personalized, always-on gateway to proactively manage their academic and extracurricular lives.

It’s called AI-first Student Success.

The Promise of AI Is Here for Your Students

What we’re about to describe will sound outlandish.

There is an app that gives students immediate, 1:1 support across campus, and your school already has everything it needs to set it up.

No complex integrations. No months-long efforts to reimagine how your departments do their work. No design committees. No time-consuming training for staff or students. Just a streamlined solution to the old, cost-intensive way of providing student services.

If you’ve been wondering how AI will improve your and your students’ lives, this is it.

Here’s how it works.

StudentHub, Element451’s AI-first student success solution, brings together the power of AI, decades of higher ed experience, and exceptional user experience to create a truly one-stop destination for a seamless student journey.

AI assistants, for example, are a tap away night and day, weekends and holidays, to answer questions in any language. They use your school’s knowledge base (essentially every document, video, web page, course catalog, and other relevant institutional materials) to guide students when they need help. All students have to do is type or speak and the assistant replies just like it was having a conversation.

Chat isn’t the only way StudentHub provides knowledge and support.

StudentHub greets students with a custom home screen where they can search just like they do on Google but with hyper-useful results.

The technology is called generative AI search. We call it Bolt Discovery.

Instead of providing a long list of results that require clicking through to see if they’re what the student is looking for, Bolt Discovery gives students a summary of what they asked about.

For example, if a student asks about prerequisites for a course they want to take, they’ll get a straightforward answer drawn from the knowledge base. If they want to dig deeper, they can click on the sources Bolt Discovery got the answer from. If there’s a video that answers their question, it gets served up too.

Another area where StudentHub shines is early interventions and push notifications.

Say a student is behind in a class, StudentHub automatically connects them with the right support while there’s still time to get back on track.

Academically successful students are much more likely to stay enrolled, and improving completion rates is a top priority for all schools.

StudentHub also keeps students engaged by sending important announcements and reminders that can boost enrollment and retention.

Research shows, for example, that one of the biggest roadblocks for accepted students to become enrolled students is laborious paperwork and unclear deadlines. There’s simply too much to keep track of. StudentHub serves as that super-involved parent or family member who makes sure things are done on time.

Key support contacts — like AI academic and career advisors and human faculty — are also within quick reach. StudentHub connects students to essential support networks based on their major, courses, year, and other details unique to them.

With StudentHub, institutions can deliver AI-first student success: a streamlined, always-available experience that adapts to students’ unique needs, drives engagement, improves retention, and guides students through their academic journey every step of the way.

This is the power of AI we’ve all been waiting for.

Learn more about StudentHub at Element451.com.