Watch Now
Building Capacity Without Burning Out: How Two Year Colleges Are Scaling Student Support Smarter
At colleges and universities across the country, leaders are being asked to do something that often feels impossible: improve outcomes, respond to shifting enrollment patterns, support increasingly complex student needs, and protect staff from burnout, all at the same time.
For leaders who prioritize impact, the question is not whether students need support. We already know they do.
The question is how institutions can deliver that support at scale, in ways that are timely, personal, and sustainable for staff.
That challenge was at the center of a recent conversation with two higher education leaders who know this reality firsthand: Dr. Sheenah Hartigan, Assistant Vice President for Enrollment Services at Ocean County College, and Dr. Nicole Cippoletti, Dean of the Scotch Plains Campus and Virtual Campus at Union College of Union County, New Jersey.
What they described was not a story about replacing people with technology. It was a story about extending human capacity, protecting staff time for the moments that matter most, and building systems that help colleges act earlier, smarter, and with greater precision.
The problem is not knowing what students need. It is capacity.
Both leaders made a similar point: in most cases, colleges already know the key milestones students need to reach. The real constraint is having enough capacity to reach every student at the right time, in the right way.
At Ocean County College, Hartigan described the challenge clearly. Student needs come in waves: the weeks before the semester starts, the first days of classes, the May 1 decision period. If institutions staffed every office for peak demand all year long, they would need “dozens and dozens” more advisors, recruiters, and front-line support staff. That is simply not realistic.
And yet students still need help outside traditional business hours. Before implementing Reggie, OCC surveyed students and found that many were doing enrollment-related tasks between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. As Hartigan put it, “We were lacking the ability to meet students where they were when they needed us.”
At UCNJ, Cippoletti framed the issue similarly. “The constraint was never dedication,” she said. “It was always resources and capacity.” Her team had committed staff doing everything they could to support students, but during peak periods, too many interactions became transactional because there simply was not enough time to engage every student with the care and nuance their situation required.
That distinction matters. The challenge is not staff commitment. It is that the traditional model asks humans alone to absorb a volume and complexity of communication that no team can sustainably manage.
Today’s students expect support that is timely, relevant, and personal
A second theme came through just as strongly: students’ expectations have changed.
Hartigan reflected on how older communication models once depended on long lead times and static channels. There was a time when an eight-week event marketing cycle made sense. But that is not how many students engage today.
“Students expect that you’re going to communicate with them when they need to know the information,” she said.
That shift has practical implications. At OCC, the team saw early evidence that students were much more likely to act on immediate, relevant text outreach than on carefully staged traditional campaigns. One of the first examples was simple: a text inviting students already on campus to participate in trick-or-treating. The response was so immediate they ran out of candy within an hour and a half.
The lesson was bigger than the event itself. Students were not just receiving the message. They were acting on it right away.
That insight reshaped how OCC thought about outreach more broadly. When the college needed to launch credited ESL classes quickly, the team sent only a text invitation to prospective students, just 17 days before the information session. Nearly 50 people showed up, and more than 25% registered for classes on the spot.
For institutions used to long communication cycles and broad campaigns, that kind of responsiveness is a signal worth paying attention to.
Precision matters more than volume
One of the clearest takeaways from both leaders was that effective communication is not about sending more messages. It is about sending fewer, better ones.
Hartigan described how OCC uses student data and audience segmentation to avoid blanket outreach. If the college already knows whether a student has applied, submitted FAFSA, or registered, there is no need to ask questions it should already be able to answer. Instead, the institution can focus on what matters next.
“We hate to ask a question that we know the answer to,” she said.
That matters because students increasingly expect institutions to know where they are in the process. Generic communication feels less helpful and less credible. Precision, by contrast, makes support feel relevant.
At UCNJ, Cippoletti emphasized the same principle from an institutional governance standpoint. The goal was to move away from what she described as a “junk drawer for communication” and toward a more intentional, centralized approach. Messages sent through the chatbot had to align with institutional priorities such as enrollment, student success, or post-completion outcomes. Not every announcement deserved a text. Not every audience needed the same message.
As Cippoletti put it, the goal was “fewer messages, more precision.”
For leaders focused on impact, that is an important reframing. The objective is not to maximize outreach volume. It is to increase the relevance and usefulness of each touchpoint.
Better communication does more than inform. It generates signal.
What makes this approach especially powerful is that it does not just push information out. It also creates opportunities for students to respond, revealing needs that might otherwise remain invisible.
That was one of the most compelling parts of the conversation.
At UCNJ, Cippoletti described a “pulse check” sent early in the semester to about 8,500 enrolled students. The message was simple: the first weeks of a semester can be challenging, how are things going?
Nearly 2,000 students responded.
That alone is remarkable. But the deeper value was in what those responses revealed. Some students indicated they were doing fine. Others shared that they were struggling or feeling overwhelmed and were then connected to relevant campus resources. In one case, a student disclosed self-harm concerns. Because the system flagged concerning language and escalated it immediately to the appropriate staff, the college was able to intervene quickly. Cippoletti shared that the response helped save a student’s life.
That is the kind of impact leaders care about.
Not because every message will surface a crisis, but because scalable, two-way communication creates visibility. It allows institutions to detect need earlier, respond more thoughtfully, and move from reactive support to proactive intervention.
Or, in Cippoletti’s words: “We’re regularly picking up on signals that we wouldn’t normally have seen.”
The real win is not automation. It is better human intervention.
Neither leader described this work as “set it and forget it.” In fact, both made the opposite point.
At OCC, student responses are routed based on need and student attributes, helping connect the right student to the right expert. Someone with a financial aid barrier does not need the same next step as someone who needs help choosing a schedule or finding a job. The value is not in removing humans from the process. It is in making sure human time is spent where it is most needed.
At UCNJ, Cippoletti made a similar point about escalation design. When a message suggests a need for direct intervention, the system routes it to the right office or individual. That design matters, especially when student safety is involved. Even when staff are not immediately available, the system can still provide crisis information and emergency guidance in real time.
This is what smart scaling actually looks like: automation handling the repeatable and predictable so staff can focus on the sensitive, complex, and high-stakes moments that require judgment, care, and expertise.
That is not a lesser human role. It is a more meaningful one.
Colleges should not build these systems without students
When asked what advice they would give peers trying to move from broadcast communication toward more precise, student-centered engagement, both leaders came back to the same starting point: involve students.
Hartigan’s advice was direct. Institutions can make strategic decisions based on reports, charts, and institutional data, but they should not make those decisions without student input.
“How do you want to hear from the college? When do you want to hear from the college? What should we be saying to you?” she asked.
Cippoletti echoed that point, describing how UCNJ involved cross-functional colleagues and student workers in shaping, testing, and refining their approach. Students helped test tone, language, and even multilingual interactions. That kind of feedback helped the college build something more useful and more trusted.
For leaders, this may be the most important lesson of all: precision is not just a technical capability. It is a listening practice.
Impact requires a new operating model
If there is a broader takeaway from Ocean County College and UCNJ, it is this: building capacity without burning out does not happen by asking staff to work harder inside the same broken model.
It happens by rethinking the model itself.
It means recognizing that:
- students expect communication that is immediate, relevant, and responsive
- staff capacity should be reserved for moments that truly require human intervention
- broad, generic outreach is often less effective than smaller, better-targeted communication
- student responses are not just engagement metrics, but actionable signals
- collaboration across departments, and with students themselves, is essential
For institutions that prioritize impact, the goal is not merely operational efficiency. It is better outcomes, stronger student trust, and a more sustainable way for teams to do mission-critical work.
Two-year colleges have long been leaders in adaptability, pragmatism, and student-centered innovation. What Hartigan and Cippoletti shared is a reminder that some of the most important innovation happening right now is not flashy. It is foundational.
It is the work of building systems that help colleges listen better, act sooner, and support more students without asking already-stretched teams to carry the impossible alone.