Ask faculty what’s getting in the way of student success and ‘study skills’ rise to the top. Ask students, and a different picture begins to emerge.
In the latest Time for Class survey, 68 percent of faculty and 53 percent of administrators identify ineffective study skills as students’ leading challenge. Students rank study skills third, while 40 percent point to workload anxiety as their biggest classroom challenge. Faculty rank students being underprepared second; students put it ninth.
Those differences matter because faculty and students encounter different parts of the same experience. Faculty encounter students through teaching, engagement and academic performance: what gets turned in, what gets missed and who appears to be falling behind. Students can describe pressures that are harder to see from that vantage point, including how they experience their workload and the demands competing for their attention.
The Gap Extends Beyond First Year
Workload anxiety is reported by 40 percent of first-year students and 51 percent of fourth-years. That complicates the idea that workload anxiety is primarily a first-year transition challenge. Whatever sits behind the difference, the concern clearly remains relevant well beyond orientation and the first semester.
The workload findings also sit alongside a broader pattern. Mental health and wellness has been students’ top self-reported life challenge for three straight years, cited by 37 percent of respondents. Yet fewer than 20 percent of students who describe facing mental health challenges use their institution’s counseling services. Somewhere between what colleges offer and what students actually draw on, something is being lost.
Support awareness is also associated with a sizeable difference in students’ reported likelihood of staying enrolled. Students aware of more than four institutional support resources report an 84 percent likelihood of staying enrolled, compared with 67 percent among students aware of fewer. The relationship doesn’t establish cause and effect, but a 17-point difference makes awareness difficult to treat as peripheral.
From Available to Usable
The report’s findings on student support use complicates the picture further. Availability is only the first step. Students still need to know if a resource exists, recognize when it applies to them and be able to use it when they need it. Among students who already know a service exists, 42 percent are unsure whether it applies to someone like them, 30 percent cite inconvenient hours or access, and 30 percent cite stigma. The Tyton findings show how easily that path can break down. Awareness is not evenly distributed either. Black students report the lowest awareness of nearly every support service Tyton tracks.
Looking at support from the student’s side shifts the focus from whether a service exists, to whether students experience it as something that’s within reach. That means tracing how students encounter support, how they recognize when it applies to them, what makes it easier or harder to access and how faculty can connect them with the right kind of help. The easier that path is to understand, the less a student needs to know about how the institution itself is organized before they can find the right help. Finding the right service can depend on already knowing whether a concern belongs to advising, financial aid, health services or somewhere else entirely. That’s a discoverability problem that institutions can act on directly, separate from the deeper question of why the underlying pressures exist in the first place.
Dr. Cristi Ford touches on this distinction in the research, cautioning against assuming that low usage automatically means support services are sufficient or ineffective. “Resources aren’t a monolith,” she notes, pointing out that institutions need to consider whether available services truly align with the needs of the students they serve.
Seeing More of the Student Experience
Faculty observation and student self-report reveal different parts of the student experience. Read together, they show where students appear to be struggling, how students themselves understand that struggle and whether the support built for them feels within reach. That fuller view can help institutions see where the distance between needing support and reaching it begins.
As Dr. Emma Zone notes, student pressure and AI adoption may be more connected than many institutions realize. “One of the insights around the pressure students are feeling being a prerequisite to them seeking tools like AI to make things easier is something institutions really have to pay attention to.”
That observation reinforces an important lesson from the latest findings. Students may not always describe their challenges the way faculty or administrators do, but their experiences offer valuable clues about where support systems, course design and institutional interventions can have the greatest impact.
The Year Ahead
As another academic year gets underway, understanding those differences may be one of the most important steps institutions can take. When colleges and universities see student challenges through both lenses, what faculty observe and what students report, they are better positioned to close the gap between support that exists and support that students can readily access.
CTA: Explore the full Time for Class 2026 findings to see what students, faculty and administrators are telling us about where higher education is headed.
Written by:
