Students Already Know Their University's Software Is Broken

Picture two meetings happening at the same university on the same afternoon. In one room, a group of students is venting about the registration portal. It crashed twice during add/drop week, nobody could figure out where to find their financial aid status, and the mobile app requires logging into three separate systems just to see a class schedule. In another room, the CIO is presenting the annual technology report to senior leadership, and the student portal is listed as a strength.

Both rooms are telling the truth. That gap between them is one of the most consequential and least discussed problems in higher education technology today.

The Perception Problem Is Well Documented

This isn’t speculation. In a 2024 survey conducted by Inside Higher Ed and the technology services firm Collegis Education, 37% of students identified their institution's online portal as a system that needed significant improvement. In a separate survey of public college CIOs by EDUCAUSE, 70% rated their student portal highly. The students and the people running the technology are looking at the same product and seeing something fundamentally different.

The Pathify 2025 Student Digital Experience Survey, which drew on responses from more than 1,000 college students across the United States, found that 59% of students said their campus systems were not nearly as intuitive as services like Netflix, Amazon, or DoorDash. Nearly half, 47%, said they had missed a critical deadline, including assignment submissions, tuition payments, or course registration windows, because they were unable to figure out where to go in a fragmented collection of portals and links. More than half said the digital experience at their institution causes them stress at least some of the time.

The critical detail is not the frustration itself. Students have always had to navigate bureaucracy. The critical detail is what students are comparing that frustration against, and what conclusions they draw from it.

The Consumer Technology Baseline Has Changed Everything

Students entering college today have grown up with technology that learns their preferences, surfaces what they need before they search for it, and works seamlessly across every device they own. They don’t think of this as a luxury. They think of it as how software works.

When they encounter a university portal that requires separate logins for the library, the financial aid office, the registrar, and the learning management system, they don’t interpret this as an institutional technology challenge. They interpret it as an institutional attitude. The message received, even if it is not the message intended, is that their time is not valuable enough to have been considered when the system was designed.

The University of Arizona documented this dynamic plainly after conducting its own student discovery research. Students told administrators that they were frustrated not with any single system, but with the sense that the university was interacting with them as though it were two hundred separate organizations that never spoke to each other. The institution that a student experiences is the sum of every digital touchpoint, and when those touchpoints do not cohere, students feel it as a kind of institutional indifference.

That’s an unfair interpretation of what is actually happening inside university IT departments, which are underfunded, often understaffed, and working with systems built in the 1990s. But fairness is not the point. Perception is the point, and the perception has real consequences.

The Stakes Are Higher Than Inconvenience

When administrators think about broken software, they tend to think about operational inefficiency: staff time spent on workarounds, calls to the help desk, delayed processing of paperwork. When students encounter broken software, they often think about something much more personal.

The 2024 Inside Higher Ed and Collegis study found that more than 40% of students who had experienced frustrating technology interactions said those experiences could affect their decision to continue their enrollment. Nearly 39% said the same experiences might affect whether they continued their education at all. These are not trivial numbers. They connect administrative software quality directly to retention, which is the metric that determines whether a university's finances are stable from year to year.

The financial aid system is where this dynamic becomes most visible. The chaotic rollout of the redesigned federal FAFSA form in 2023 and 2024 delayed aid packages for millions of students across the country, and some students never submitted their applications at all after encountering repeated technical errors. The National College Attainment Network found that, as of mid-2024, only 46% of new high school graduates had completed the FAFSA, down from 53% the year before. Students who give up on the financial aid process are students who often give up on college.

Research from Ellucian found that 44% of students surveyed said they would switch their top-choice school if offered as little as $5,000 more in financial aid. When aid information arrives late or is difficult to understand because the delivery system is broken, students make enrollment decisions without complete information, and they are more susceptible to that $5,000 swing than they would otherwise be.

Why the Gap Persists

The perception gap between students and administrators doesn’t persist because university leaders don’t care about the student experience. Most of them care deeply. It persists because of how technology feedback travels inside large institutions.

Students talk to each other, post in Reddit threads, and complain to academic advisors who may or may not have a channel to the IT department. They rarely fill out formal feedback surveys about administrative software, partly because they don’t expect anything to change, and partly because nobody told them such a channel existed. What reaches leadership is the formal satisfaction data, which tends to be collected through institutional surveys designed by the same offices being evaluated.

Meanwhile, IT teams are measuring uptime, ticket resolution time, and system availability, all of which can look excellent while the actual user experience remains genuinely bad. A portal can be up 99.9% of the time and still require twelve clicks to accomplish something a student should be able to do in two.

The universities making real progress on this problem are the ones that have started treating student digital experience as a discipline in its own right, with dedicated research into how students actually move through systems, not just whether those systems are technically functional. The University of Arizona is one documented example of an institution that spent years conducting student discovery work before redesigning its approach, and found surprises. Some processes students were assumed to hate were not actually important to them, while other frictions that administrators had not considered were generating significant stress.

What Institutions Aren’t Asking

The dominant conversation in higher education technology circles is about which systems to buy, when to migrate, and how to manage implementation risk. These are real and difficult questions. But they are upstream of the question that arguably matters more: what do students experience when they interact with the institution through its technology, and does that experience communicate that the institution respects their time and understands their needs?

A student who graduates from a university that treated every administrative interaction as an afterthought will remember that. A student who almost left because financial aid information arrived late through a confusing portal, who had to call the office four times because the online system gave them conflicting information, will carry that memory of the institution forward. They might still graduate. They might even donate someday. But they will also tell people what it was like.

Universities spend enormous resources on marketing, on campus facilities, and on student life programming, all in service of building an institution that students feel proud to have attended. The software that students interact with every day is part of that institution. Right now, for most students at most schools, it is the part that consistently falls short. That is not a technology problem. It is a question of what the institution actually believes its students are worth.