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A student wants to change her major. Her advisor sends her to another department. Financial aid sends her somewhere else. The registrar has a hold on her account because of a library fine she paid months ago.
Three weeks and four offices later, she gives up and stays in a major she doesn't want.
Nobody deliberately designed that experience. It accumulated over time.
Higher education institutions are organized around departments, systems, policies, and reporting lines. Each may be working as intended, yet students still struggle to get simple things done. The problem isn't always what's happening inside each department. It's what happens between them.
In this episode of Transformed, Higher Digital Co-founder and CEO Wayne Bovier sits down with Ryan McGarry, Product Lead at Higher Digital, to explore why institutions need to rethink the student experience from end to end, and how AI could help close the gaps between departments.
The conversation centers on a fundamental challenge:
Every department can be performing well while the institution is still failing the student.
Students don't think in departments. They think about what they're trying to accomplish: changing their major, dropping a class without losing financial aid, or getting an answer to a question. Yet too often, they're left to connect the dots between offices, repeat their stories, and navigate processes no one has examined as a whole.
Wayne and Ryan explore what it takes to change that, including:
- Why students experience one institution even when its operations are fragmented across dozens of departments and systems
- How journey mapping exposes friction that individual departments may never see
- Why rekeying forms, chasing holds, and moving students between offices waste both staff time and student effort
- Why AI could act as an integration layer, carrying information between offices, answering questions in plain language, and identifying patterns before problems multiply
- Where AI should stop and human judgment must take over, especially when students face crises or consequential decisions
The conversation challenges a familiar assumption: institutional transformation doesn't always begin with a new system. Sometimes, it begins by examining an experience the institution has never looked at from beginning to end.
AI creates new opportunities to connect information and reduce friction, but technology alone won't fix processes that were never designed around the student's needs. Institutions still have to identify where things break down, bring the right people together, and decide what a better experience should look like.
Because the goal isn't simply to move students through institutional processes more efficiently. It's to help them accomplish what they came to the institution to do.
If you're a president, provost, CIO, or higher education leader responsible for student experience, operations, or digital transformation, this conversation offers a practical way to identify hidden friction, rethink how departments work together, and put AI to work where it can make a meaningful difference.
Subscribe to Transformed for more conversations with higher education leaders navigating institutional complexity, technology, and the future of the university.
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