Every university is being asked to square the same circle. Demand for student support is rising, expectations are climbing, and the budget to meet all of it is not growing at the same rate. Careers and student services teams feel this acutely. There are more students to help, more complex needs to meet, and no realistic prospect of the headcount required to meet them the old way.
The instinctive response is to ask people to work harder. But teams that are already stretched simply reach breaking point, and the quality of support falls and fails exactly where and who it matters most. The institutions coping best have taken a different view. Rather than asking their people to do more, they have asked a sharper question, which is whether their people are spending time on the things that only people can do.
Hours to 15 minutes
A Freedom of Information request that once took a good few hours now takes about fifteen minutes, thanks to automated reporting across student services.
Leeds Beckett University →Worth three staff
The efficiency gained from the platform is, in the team’s own estimate, worth having three additional members of staff.
London South Bank University →Data to the top table
Service data now feeds straight to the university leadership team, showing impact in the top-line terms busy executives need.
Edinburgh Napier University →
A great deal of what a careers or student services team does each week does not require professional judgement. Booking appointments, sending reminders, answering the same routine questions, chasing students who have not engaged, pointing people towards resources that already exist. This work is necessary, but it is not the work a trained adviser trained for. When it fills the calendar, the high-value work, the coaching, the difficult conversations, the genuine guidance, gets squeezed.
Rethinking student services starts here. The goal is not to replace people but to protect their time. When routine tasks are automated and students can self-serve the straightforward things, advisers are freed to spend their hours on the interactions that actually change outcomes. A student who can book their own appointment, find opportunities matched to them and get instant answers to simple questions is a student who is easier to support.
This is also where data earns its keep. Teams operating with limited resources cannot afford to spread themselves evenly across every student. They need to see who is disengaging, who is at risk of leaving without a plan, and who would benefit most from a timely nudge. Targeting effort where it matters most is not a luxury. When resources are tight, it is the only sustainable way to work.
There is a quiet benefit to all of this that budgets do not capture, which is staff wellbeing. Support teams did not join a university to spend their days on admin. Giving them back the parts of the job they find meaningful is one of the most effective retention strategies a service can have, and it costs very little.
So where does your own service sit? Most teams are somewhere on a spectrum, from running almost everything by hand to operating lean and data-led by design. Knowing which end you are closer to is the first step to freeing up time you did not know you had.
Student services self-audit
Where is your team’s time actually going?
Doing more with less is often framed as a grim necessity, a euphemism for cuts. It does not have to be. Handled well, it is a chance to strip out the work that never should have consumed so much time and to reinvest that time in the students who need it. The universities getting this right are not simply surviving with fewer resources. They are delivering better support because they finally stopped wasting the resource that was always most precious, which is the attention of their people.
