EAB just surveyed student success leaders nationwide, and the results describe a system falling behind its own caseload. Fifty-nine percent report declining social readiness among students over the past year. Fifty-four percent report declining academic readiness. Only 7% saw improvement in either.
Pandemic-era disruptions to student preparedness were supposed to fade. This data says they have not.
Why is student support capacity outpaced by need? A 2026 EAB survey of student success leaders found rising financial, mental health, and readiness pressures colliding with flat or shrinking budgets and staff. Seventy-one percent of leaders cited financial challenges and 48% cited mental health concerns as factors hurting retention, while 60% cited budget constraints and 55% cited staffing shortages as the primary barriers to meeting student success goals. The result is a widening gap between the support students need and the support institutions can staff to deliver.
Every one of those pressures existed before. What is new is how many are converging on offices that have not grown to match them.
The students who "look really good on paper"
Tara Zirkel, an EAB director, put the problem in terms every advisor recognizes: "We have students that look really good on paper... and then they vanish."
A transcript does not show a student choosing rent over textbooks. A GPA does not show a student quietly managing a mental health crisis. These are the departures that advising teams rarely see coming, because the signals that predict them live outside the academic record entirely.
"If we treat all students the same, we're overserving some and underserving others." — Tara Zirkel, EAB
For Career Services Teams at Universities
A fixed staff cannot personalize outreach at scale, on its own
55% of student success leaders cite staffing shortages as a barrier to meeting student support goals. Prentus handles the routine, high-volume check-ins with an AI career advisor students actually use, so your staff's time goes to the students who need direct human judgment.
Institutions already know what the fix looks like
The same survey found 44% of leaders already identify proactive, targeted advising as their most effective intervention. And 59% believe AI should handle routine interactions while staff stays focused on complex needs.
That is not a hypothetical roadmap. That is institutions describing, in their own survey answers, a division of labor they have not yet been able to staff or build: automate the high-volume, routine touchpoints, and reserve human time for the students whose situations require it.
The same data gap shows up on the back end. Forty percent of institutions still do not track graduate earnings data, which means many of the same schools straining to support students during enrollment cannot verify what happened to them afterward, an issue we have also seen play out in workforce program outcomes data.
Budgets and headcount are not the lever colleges get to pull
Sixty percent of leaders cite budget constraints as a barrier to meeting student success goals. Enrollment pressure at many institutions makes new hiring even less likely next year than this one.
That leaves one lever institutions actually control: how much of a fixed staff's time goes to routine, repeatable check-ins versus the students who need a real conversation. Schools that separate those two categories, instead of applying the same generic outreach to every student, can cover a growing caseload with the team they already have.
- Automate the routine. Status checks, resource pointers, and scheduling do not need a staff member's attention every time.
- Target the risk, not the roster. A single outreach cadence for every student overserves the ones who are fine and underserves the ones who are not.
- Meet students where they already are. Support that only exists during office hours misses students managing jobs, family, and finances around a class schedule.
- Close the loop after graduation. The same proactive model that keeps a student enrolled can keep tracking them into their first job, closing the earnings-data gap 40% of institutions currently have.
The colleges that solve this will not be the ones with the biggest budgets. They will be the ones that stopped treating every student the same and found a way to scale attention instead of headcount.
If you are working out how to catch more students without adding staff, we would welcome the conversation.
Source: Inside Higher Ed, "Student Support Needs Outpace College Capacity", September 3, 2026, reporting on EAB survey data.
