Designing student-centric solutions through collaboration

Abstract

The existing organizational structures and design of higher education institutions can best be described as university-centric where a student engages in various moving parts that, at times, can be described as disjointed, loosely coupled, and bureaucratic. Also, significant research and reports find that employees are questioning the education to employability readiness of graduates. These two instances lay a foundation where higher education institutions can evolve to meet a holistic student-journey that transitions a student from education to employability. Thus, the purpose of this research study was to understand the experiences that mid-level higher education leaders have when designing student-centric solutions. A qualitative Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach was used to understand the experiences of four higher education administrators that lead student-centric initiatives at the non-profit higher education institutions they serve. Design thinking was used as the theoretical framework. Through design thinking, design teams seek to understand the unseen or unarticulated needs of a customer. This approach is appropriate as higher education seeks to better understand how to best support the needs of students as they transition from education to employment. Three major findings emerged from the collection of superordinate and sub-themes. First, higher education administrators' strong-sense of empathetic behaviors toward the student journey is influenced by past events and behaviors they experienced. Second, this study found that higher education administrators possess the ability to overcome challenges by using a combination of qualitative story-telling data and sense-making to change perspectives. Finally, this study found that higher education administrators collaboratively seek to develop empathetic solutions that positively influence the holistic student lifelong educational and employability journey. These findings provide practitioners a greater understanding of the motivation, barriers, and approaches that higher education administrators leverage as they initiate and design student-centric solutions as they attempt to close the education to employability gap. This work concludes with a discussion of these findings in the context of future research and practice implications. Keywords: design thinking, customer-centric, student-centric, university-centric.