The term “student success” seems to be everywhere in higher education, but what does it really mean? 

In 2024-2025, I had the privilege of serving on a six-person “expert group” reviewing the Irish National Framework for Student Success in Higher Education. In this blog post, I’llreflect on one thing I learned from that process—that the meaning and implications of “student success” vary depending on your perspective.  

Background 

First, though, a little background: In 2019, the Irish Higher Education Authority (HEA) published “Understanding and Enabling Student Success in Irish Higher Education” to articulate a shared framework for student success. In 2022, three Irish higher education groups collaborated to produce the “Seven Cs for Embedding Student Success: A Toolkit for Higher Education Institutions” to support a “whole-of-institution” approach to advancing student success. Both documents are valuable, and the Toolkit is a particularly helpful resource for anyone working to advance student success in any higher education context. 

In 2024, the HEA commissioned a review of the student success framework given the dramatic pressures put on Irish students and higher education over the prior five years—COVID-19 pandemic, economic disruptions, technology changes, immigration and emigration trends, and more. Our expert group worked for nearly a year through a range of steps (detailed on pages 13-16) to produce a July 2025 report titled “Review of the Irish National Framework for Student Success in Higher Education.”  

Through our research and consultations, we noticed that while the 2019 Irish definition of student success is widely understood and valued across the sector, in practice, a single perspective on student success obscures variations and tensions within this broad concept, and those variations and tensions have significant implications for faculty, staff, policy-makers, and institutions working on student success in higher education.  

Perspectives 

We identified three distinct yet complementary perspectives on student success (page 21 in the Review, paraphrased below): 

Student-defined success. 

From this perspective, the meaning of student success is—and should be—determined by students themselves. For some, success means career preparation. For others, it’s about having a positive experience in college. Still others define it as balancing academic growth with personal well-being, even if that does not involve following the typical path or timeline to a degree—or earning a degree at all. This perspective treats student success as individual and personal, reflecting student identity, demographic, and other factors (commuters, adult learners, first-generation students, etc.), while also evolving as students grow and change as they move through their education. To honor this perspective, students need support in reflecting on and articulating their own understandings of success—and institutions and policymakers should ask whether students are meeting their own goals, rather than whether they are hitting externally determined benchmarks. 

Institution-created success. 

From this perspective, student success is primarily the responsibility of the institution and of everyone working within it. Here, success means that the institution—through its faculty, staff, programs, policies, and facilities— creates a positive educational environment where all students can learn, belong, thrive, and progress. This requires agile institutions that respond to student needs and remove barriers to learning and well-being. Institutions must cultivate spaces and cultures where all students feel they belong and matter, and where students are empowered to access resources to pursue their educational goals. Different institutions will conceptualize and pursue student success somewhat differently, based on their students’ characteristics and needs. The ultimate measure of success here is whether an institution has done all it can to enable students to learn and progress through the academic program. 

Outcomes-oriented success. 

From this perspective, student success is understood primarily through the products of education. This approach emphasizes the value generated by educational experiences and the degree itself—whether framed narrowly through program outcomes and progression to rewarding employment immediately following graduation, or more broadly as producing graduates who are able to thrive personally, professionally, and civically throughout their lives. An outcomes approach is built on a foundation of retention and progress through college, since students can only be successful by completing their program. And this orientation, more than the other two, relies on tangible post-degree metrics related to topics such as employment, earnings, well-being, and civic engagement. While this perspective allows some variation based on student goals and institutional mission, the ultimate measures of outcomes-oriented success tend to be consistent across the higher education sector. 

These three perspectives aren’t mutually exclusive, but starting from one will lead to distinct practices, strategies, policies, and measurements. There’s something like a path dependency. An outcomes-oriented understanding of success might prioritize job placement rates as a key success metric, while employment data might or might not be relevant to a student-defined framework. Conversely, narratives about students’ college experiences would be essential for evaluating student-defined approaches, but those same narratives would be valued and interpreted differently depending on whether the goal is helping students articulate their own paths or determining whether the institution met its programmatic objectives. 

These three perspectives show up clearly across Irish higher education. For those of us outside of Ireland, identifying and acting on these—and perhaps other, context-specific —perspectives may enable everyone in higher education, including our students, to achieve our varied student success goals. 

References 

Higher Education Authority. 2025. Review of the Irish National Framework for Student Success in Higher Education: Report of the Expert Group. Ballsbridge, Ireland.https://hea.ie/assets/uploads/2025/07/HEA-Student-Success-Framework-Review.pdf. 

National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. 2019. Understanding and Enabling Student Success in Irish Higher Education. Dublin, Ireland.https://hub.teachingandlearning.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/NF-2019-Student-Success-report-web-ready.pdf. 

National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. 2021. Seven Cs for Embedding Student Success: A Toolkit for Higher Education Institutions. Dublin, Ireland. https://studentsuccess.teachingandlearning.ie/. 

About the Author

Peter Felten is executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning, professor of history, and assistant provost for teaching and learning at Elon University. He has published eight books about undergraduate education, including Connections are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education (Johns Hopkins University Press 2023) co-authored by Isis Artze-Vega, Leo Lambert, and Oscar Miranda Tapia, and The SoTL Guide (Elon University Center for Engaged Learning 2025) co-authored by Katarina Mårtensson and Nancy Chick– with open access online versions free to all readers. He is on the advisory board of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and is a fellow of the Gardner Institute. Learn more about Peter’s scholarship.

How to Cite This Post

Felten, Peter. 2026. “Three Perspectives on Student Success.” Center for Engaged Learning (blog). Elon University, January 27, 2026. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/three-perspectives-on-student-success/.