Student Takeover Edition

At UDI, co-design is not a methodology we apply selectively. It is a foundational conviction: that the people most affected by a system are among its most essential designers. In higher education, that means students.

Graduation offers a moment to reflect on the relationships, experiences, and communities that shape a student’s journey. This edition of The Co-Lab Brief draws on those reflections to better understand how students make meaning of their studies.

Throughout our work at UDI, students are routinely engaged in various aspects of the iterative process of co-design.

Pranshi Vats, a Master's candidate in Global Management with a concentration in International Business, and Moksha Smruthi Morapakala, a graduate student in Data Sciences and Analytics, have spent the past year as integral members of UDI’s Co-Lab team, identifying trends, surfacing insights, and tracking innovation across the higher education landscape. They are also both graduating this spring. In this edition, they take it over entirely.

Pranshi, Smruthi, take it away…

Welcome to this student edition of The Co-Lab Brief. Here, we respond to the question:

As universities worldwide mark graduation, this edition of The Co-Lab Brief centers the student perspective. We organize the brief around two guiding questions: what is working and worth keeping, and where students encounter uncertainty as they transition beyond the university.

This analysis draws on:

• Autoethnographic reflection from student contributors
• Conversations with undergraduate students across professional, STEM, and humanities programs
• Interviews our partner universities conducted with students after they had participated in UDI transformation roadmap workshops

Across these sources, a consistent pattern emerges: the same systems that support meaningful learning can also produce friction as conditions change.

This is a call for targeted redesign. By clarifying both points of strength and areas of concern, this brief contributes to ongoing efforts to better align institutional intention with student experience.

Our International Student Experience

Stepping onto a university campus is a life-changing experience for most, and it was no different for us. We arrived from India at two very different stages of life, one as an undergraduate navigating the disorientation of studying abroad for the first time, and the other as a graduate student developing a technical skillset while preparing to enter a volatile global workforce.

Despite these different starting points, we found common ground in the realities that shape the international student experience. Much of what defines success exists beyond the formal curriculum, in the unspoken expectations, informal networks, and moments of access that are not always visible or evenly distributed. Learning how to navigate those spaces often becomes as important as the coursework itself.

These thought pieces reflect on our experience from the inside. They are accounts of what it means to invest in a system while learning, often in real time, how to move within it. We invite you to read our stories.

The observations below synthesize student perspectives gathered through surveys and informal interviews across undergraduate STEM, professional, and social science programs, as well as the experiences of the student authors.

What's Working in Higher Education

Experiential Learning: Course-aligned projects and case studies that mirror real-world industry challenges.

Mobility & Networking: Platforms (student organizations, university events, etc.) that allow students to build deep professional networks.

Industry-Specific Micro-credentials: Credentials (such as semiconductor manufacturing, data analytics, or UX design) embedded directly into degree pathways.

Opportunities for Redesign

Industry-University-Integrated Pathways: Partnerships that translate into structured and reliable pipelines for internships, applied learning, and post-graduation employment.

Continuity in Advising: Advising systems that enable consistent, long-term student support.

Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies: Educational models that align learning with an AI-shaped future, where students navigate uncertainty, emerging tools, and evolving career pathways in real time.

Industry-University Relationships that translate to opportunity.  

In the job market, U.S. employers are 75 percent more likely to hire a candidate who holds both a degree and an industry certificate, demonstrating the learner is coming with verifiable applied skills and not just degree credentials. But if those certificates aren’t available as part of the curriculum, the onus falls onto the student to find the correct certificates and pay for them out of pocket.

Students seeking to enter the job market spend hours preparing for career fairs — interview preparation, resume building and printing, and emotional energy — only to be told: “We don’t have any open roles right now, but please check our careers page,” effectively eliminating the benefit of networking and spending time with the recruiter. 

Continuity in Advising

According to NACADA's National Survey on Academic Advising, the median advisor-to-student ratio at four-year institutions sits at approximately 1:296, climbing significantly higher at large research universities. A 2023 student survey covered by Inside Higher Ed found that only 55% of students reported receiving guidance on required coursework and graduation pathways. The system is under strain, and students feel it.

Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies:

In our last edition of The Co-Lab Brief, higher education leaders focused on how institutions must evolve in response to an uncertain future. This month, we hear from students graduating from those same institutions, where that same uncertainty is already shaping how the future is being understood. The question related to AI is no longer just: Will I find a job? It is: Will the job I trained for still exist by the time I get there?

That anxiety now has a data point. Anthropic's Economic Index, built from real-world AI usage, found that computer and mathematical occupations have the highest observed AI coverage at 35.8%, followed by office and administrative roles at 34.3%, with business, finance, and sales close behind.

What is clear across both perspectives (leaders and students alike) is that the university's relationship to artificial intelligence is neither isolated nor settled. It is a shared question, and that shared urgency is where common ground begins.

In their own words below, students across disciplines at ASU reflect on AI in the context of their education. Their responses are not just provocations, but an invitation for institutions to consider how universities can lead in designing not around artificial intelligence, but alongside the students navigating it in real time.

From Nigeria to Zambia, students are already imagining what the future of the university could become. In this conversation, Ariel Wadamu O., a second-year student, and Tishlica Malichi, a fourth-year student, reflect on how artificial intelligence is shaping their expectations of learning. Both are students at EARTH University in Costa Rica, a participating institution in the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program e-Learning initiative.

They describe a university where AI is not separate from education, but embedded within it —supporting students in real time, expanding access to knowledge, and accelerating how learning happens. From always-available AI tutors to more responsive and adaptive systems, their perspectives point to a shift already underway.

Together, their reflections underscore a central challenge for higher education: how to design learning environments that keep pace with students who are already integrating these technologies into how they learn.