When I arrived at Forsyth Technical Community College (North Carolina) in 2019, the college’s three-year completion rate was just 19%. Graduating fewer than one out of every five students obviously was not good enough — either for local employers who needed skilled workers or for local residents who needed high-value credentials to get better jobs and make better lives.
Our faculty and staff were not the issue because they cared deeply about our students and worked hard to support them. The college’s data, research findings and our own personal and professional experiences helped us identify our challenges and adopt high-level strategies to address them. As scholars and practitioners, we believed we understood how to build the most effective systems for Forsyth Tech’s students.
Yet something was missing from our equation: input from the individuals impacted by our decisions.
Like many institutions, we created programs for our students, then surveyed them afterward to capture their ideas for future changes. As it turned out, the student voice was absent from the beginning of discussions when it was most needed.
Choosing to include the student voice at the start helped us adapt strategies not always visible in data, research or experience. By designing a program with students — not just with students in mind — Forsyth Tech developed new approaches that more than doubled our completion rate and better serve our students.
Gauging high school students
Our approach to program design changed when we teamed up with the Education Design Lab and the Gates Foundation to support Equity Accelerate, the college’s initiative to improve dual enrollment of underserved students from our local high schools. The Lab’s human-centered approach quickly convinced us that we absolutely had to include students in the design process because they ultimately would be the ones using the program we built.
With the Lab’s guidance, we worked with the local school district to identify students who could be strong contributors. Rather than throwing these high school students into the mix with college staff members and other participants, we took time to build trust and understanding. We wanted them to understand our goals and know that we wanted their guidance and input as equal team members. We compensated student participants because everyone else involved in this effort was being paid to be there.
The stories that students told us were powerful. We learned that our dual-enrollment programs were marketed differently at different high schools and to different groups of students. We learned about significant transportation challenges and how our own marketing efforts fell short. The students’ voices allowed us to build a higher-quality program that gave them exactly what they needed.
Extending to other areas
The positive experience we had with reimagining the college’s dual-enrollment program encouraged us to shift our internal culture more broadly. Instead of designing programs for students, we designed them with students.
As we turned our attention to completion rates, we knew we had strong data-informed, evidence-based and high-level understanding of the challenges faced by our students. But by talking to students directly — by listening to their voices and designing programs with them — we gained more granular examples that helped us quickly develop effective strategies to help them stay on track to complete.
For instance, we redesigned our attendance policies and scheduled later classes to accommodate students who couldn’t always get to 8 a.m. classes on time because of transportation and other issues. We began to provide drop-off childcare because our students told us they needed a place to leave their children for just an hour or two while they attended class instead of all-day care that’s increasingly unaffordable. We increased the number of highly flexible multimodal learning environments after our students said they wanted more class options to fit their unpredictable lives. When their children got sick, when their work schedules changed, or when their jobs sent them out of town, they needed live remote and asynchronous options to keep up with classes.
Listening to students and creating new programs that solved their real problems helped the college raise its three-year graduation rate to 45% as of fall 2025.
Building relationships
Changing how we work wasn’t just about raising completion rates. This cultural transformation became about building systems that sustain students over the long term. Human-centered design is about making authentic connections and building meaningful relationships.
Having in-person conversations became an integral and invaluable part of our intentional and proactive engagement process that allowed us to hear and understand more of what our students were telling us. It’s important to build trust with students over time, not just reach out to them when they’re on the verge of stopping out. When students trust you, they’re more likely to seek your assistance when they encounter barriers.
The student voice is not just one of many voices that institutions must listen to. It’s the most important voice. And while institutions might think surveys and other feedback mechanisms are enough to reach students, those that want to make real change that improves student success cannot just capture their thoughts at the end. They must listen to students from the start.
