Ways to College

Four in ten students who start college don't finish — and it's usually not about grades. Elliot Felix explains what separates the colleges that set students up to thrive from the ones that don't, and how families can tell the difference before they ever enroll. Elliot Felix trained as a designer at UVA and MIT and has spent 20 years helping more than 100 colleges — from MIT and Cornell to NYU and...

Everyone obsesses over getting in. Harlan Cohen talk focuses on what comes after, because the secret ingredient was never the school. It's the student. Harlan Cohen has spent 25+ years helping families navigate the transition into and through college. He's the author of The Naked Roommate , the bestselling book on college life, and Win or Learn , and he runs the Best First Year coaching program. W...

Brian LeDuc is a design strategist who's spent 15+ years working at the intersection of higher ed, corporate learning, and service design. He runs a consulting practice, Learning Designed, where he works with universities to redesign how campuses support the student experience. His thesis: higher ed was not designed around students. It can be — but most campuses are still set up like a mall, where...

Tom Ellett meets with his freshman advisory board on Sunday nights. He runs four standing advisory boards at Quinnipiac, for first-years, upperclassmen, dining, and parents, and works with them to co-design their college experience. Tom Ellett is the Chief Experience Officer at Quinnipiac University — a role that didn't exist before he stepped into it in 2020, and still an unusual one in higher ed...

Most colleges say they do experiential learning. Alex Hernandez can tell you exactly what separates the ones that mean it. Alex is president of Champlain College, a small career-focused school in Burlington, Vermont, where students start taking classes in their major on day one — not junior year. The model is built on a simple premise: experience is part of the education, not a bonus you might get...

A graduate with an internship doubles their odds of having a good job at graduation — and doubles their odds of being engaged in their work for the rest of their career. So why do only a third of U.S. college graduates leave school having had one? Brandon Busteed has spent his career at the intersection of education and workforce outcomes — as founder of an ed-tech company, as the executive at Gal...