Commencement season is upon us, and across the country, college campuses are steeped in the familiar rituals of academic celebration — the regalia, the processionals, the speeches about possibility and purpose.
But missing from every graduating class is the student who started that journey and did not finish it. That student left campus quietly, without ceremony, carrying debt without the credential that was supposed to justify it. Their story does not appear in graduation programs. It shows up years later in default statistics — and that gap, between who we celebrate and who we leave behind, is one of the most consequential failures in American higher education today.
What drives non-completion is rarely academic failure alone. More often it is a hold on an account the student did not know existed until registration had already closed. It is a financial aid recertification deadline that expired in a portal no one was checking. It is the accumulating weight of small administrative failures that, for a first-generation student working two jobs and supporting a family, become not inconveniences but insurmountable walls. We have built systems of remarkable complexity and then act surprised when the students with the least margin for error are the ones most likely to be defeated by them.
Virginia State University offers an instructive response. Their Front Porch Portal, developed through a multi-year partnership with the nonprofit Ed Advancement, consolidates financial aid, registration, student services, and academic information into a single mobile-friendly platform — accessible in real time on the device already in every student's pocket. The name is intentional. A front porch is where you are welcomed, where information flows naturally, where no one is turned away for not knowing which door to knock on. For first-generation students who never inherited the unwritten navigational codes of higher education, that kind of architecture is not a convenience. It can be the difference between persisting and walking away.
“With the Front Porch, the problem that we're trying to solve is really to get students access to their data,” Dr. Makola Abdullah, president of Virginia State University, told me. “We feel very strongly that the more the students are able to navigate the administrative side of their work, then they can spend more time on the academic side and do better in class.”
The connection to student debt is direct, and the research is unambiguous: students who leave college without a degree are significantly more likely to default on their loans than those who graduate, yet they frequently carry comparable debt loads. The economic logic at the center of the federal student loan system — that borrowing is justified by the credential and the earnings it unlocks — collapses when students are pushed out before they reach it. The debt, however, does not collapse. It follows them.
What Virginia State has done right, is to treat communication infrastructure as a student success strategy rather than merely an IT upgrade. That distinction matters more than it might appear. Institutions that design their student-facing systems around the student with the least institutional knowledge and the least margin for error end up building something that works for everyone. Institutions that design for an idealized “traditional student” — one with time, flexibility, and a family history of navigating academic bureaucracy — tend to fail precisely the students they most need to serve.
The expansion of Front Porch Portal to South Carolina State and Benedict College, reflects a growing recognition among Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), that student success infrastructure is not a luxury, it is a civil rights imperative. Both institutions serve predominantly Black student populations navigating the same administrative barriers that have long disadvantaged first-generation college students. Their adoption of the platform signals that this model is scalable and transferable across the HBCU landscape.
But “student-centered” isn't just a goal — it was part of the design process. Ed Advancement worked with both Virginia State and South Carolina State to gather feedback from students, informing the design and implementation of Front Porch Portal. And the response from students demonstrates that they, too, understand the need and value of a single source of truth for important deadlines, information, and campus resources. The VSU student government even hosted a launch party to build awareness and excitement about Front Porch Portal.
The urgency around this is only growing. Congress has moved to cap Grad PLUS loans, narrow Pell Grant eligibility, and contract income-driven repayment options. These changes will reduce the financial cushion available to the students who can least afford to absorb an administrative mistake. In that environment, every fragmented portal and every missed deadline notification is not a minor inconvenience; it is a policy failure compounded by an institutional one.
Retention is a debt issue. Communication is a retention issue. These are not separate conversations but the same one, long overdue for funders, policymakers, accreditors, and institutional leaders to take seriously — together.
Scaling what Ed Advancement and Virginia State have built is not simply a matter of replicating software. It requires funders willing to invest in the unglamorous infrastructure of student success — the integrations, the staff training, the iterative feedback loops with actual students. It requires institutional leaders who understand that a portal is only as good as the culture behind it, and that culture has to believe first-generation students deserve frictionless access to their own education. And it requires policymakers who recognize that no loan reform, however well-designed, can fully compensate for an institution that loses its students in a maze of its own making. The technology is available. The question is whether the will is.
Virginia State is showing what it looks like when an institution treats student success not as an aspiration but as an operational commitment. The Front Porch Portal is a model worth studying, worth scaling, and given what is at stake for so many students, worth demanding elsewhere.
Dr. Jamal Watson is a higher education consultant, professor and associate dean of Graduate Studies at Trinity Washington University and the author of this bi-weekly column. Watson is the former executive editor of Diverse: Issues In Higher Education (now The EDU Ledger) and is the author of The Student Debt Crisis: America's Moral Urgency (Broadleaf Books, 2025).
