Students often leave clues that they’re struggling before they stop attending classes or exit college altogether. But those warning signs can be scattered across different offices and data systems, making it difficult for college staff to see the full picture or intervene before a student reaches a crisis point.
As colleges increasingly experiment with artificial intelligence, some are exploring whether the technology can help connect those dots and make student support more proactive. Austin Community College, for one, is testing a new initiative designed to identify student needs earlier.
The public two-year institution recently announced the Digital Twin Initiative, a partnership with the Trellis Foundation, a Texas-based nonprofit, aimed at using AI and real-time student data to identify potential barriers before they derail a student’s progress. An $875,000 grant from the foundation will support the initiative.
Most Popular
The college plans to integrate information from across its systems to create a more holistic picture of individual students’ experiences, helping staff identify emerging needs and connect students more quickly with advising, tutoring, financial aid, mental health services and basic-needs resources. This fall, ACC is rolling out an initial version of the platform to roughly 46,000 active credit students, with additional features planned for the spring. The college will use the initial phase to test and refine the platform as part of a broader, multiphase rollout.
Russell Lowery-Hart, chancellor of Austin Community College, said colleges already collect large amounts of student data and often use early-alert systems to identify struggling students, but implementing interventions can still require multiple steps before a student actually receives help. ACC wants to use AI to shorten the time between identifying a problem and connecting a student with support.
“The grade goes in, the student gets notified and the student then immediately has options to schedule tutoring. It could be right then and there with an online tutor or a tutoring center that’s closest to them, and give them the options of time and availability and how to get there. That’s what we’re trying to build,” Lowery-Hart said. “Early alerts are a great step, but AI gives us an opportunity to remove a lot of the clunky bureaucracy that makes interventions too late for a lot of our students.”
Proactive approach: A recent survey from EAB explored the priorities and barriers shaping the work of 459 student success leaders at two- and four-year institutions nationwide. The findings suggest leaders see potential for technology and AI to help alleviate capacity constraints, but remain wary of replacing the human connections they consider central to student success.
Some 59 percent said AI can support routine or repetitive interactions but that staff interaction should remain the norm. Another 16 percent said staff interaction should remain the default in nearly all cases, while just 6 percent said AI could appropriately handle most interactions, reserving staff for students’ most complex needs.
Aaron Henry, chief of staff at Austin Community College, who is overseeing the implementation of the Digital Twin platform, said the goal is not to replace advisers with AI but to help them more effectively identify which students need their attention.
“Our advisers have probably 500 to 600 students per caseload, so you can imagine what it looks like connecting with all of those students meaningfully throughout the semester,” Henry said. “There are many more students than we have advisers, so the [Digital Twin Initiative] is an opportunity for our advisers to be more connected to our students who need them the most.”
The platform will give advisers a centralized dashboard showing student information ranging from academic progress to involvement in clubs and other activities, Henry said.
“They’re able to see a whole picture of the student right there on a dashboard, and then they’re able to provide more proactive support as it relates to those particular students that may perhaps be struggling,” he said.
Editor’s Picks
AI with guardrails: The Digital Twin Initiative is one part of ACC’s broader effort to use AI to support current students and prepare the college and surrounding community for an economy increasingly shaped by the technology.
ACC plans to build and launch a new AI-focused workforce pathway, including an electrician certification program designed to prepare students for careers supporting the growing digital and AI infrastructure across central Texas. The college will also develop outreach and training programs to help small businesses understand and adopt AI tools.
As ACC expands its use of AI, efforts to bring together academic, financial aid, advising and basic-needs information about individual students also raise questions about privacy and surveillance. Henry said ACC will retain ownership of student and institutional data used by the Digital Twin platform and that the information will not be used for purposes beyond those for which the system was designed.
“We’re following our FERPA guidelines as well as other privacy compliances as it relates to mental health counseling and those types of things,” Henry said. “We’ve also met with the [Texas Risk and Authorization Management Program] as it relates to the security, compliance, data security and governance for the actual system itself.”
Lowery-Hart said that as the program rolls out, the goal is to use technology to make support more immediate without replacing interactions between students and staff.
“Nothing is going to replace a direct conversation with a student,” Lowery-Hart said. “But right now, almost all of those conversations rely on the student reaching out, scheduling and identifying, and that’s the shift we’re trying to make.”
Get more content like this directly to your inbox. Subscribe here.