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How might AI help students navigate complex university systems and identify the right resources, requirements, opportunities, and next steps at the right time?
What is the problem?
Modern universities offer students an extraordinary range of academic programs, advising resources, experiential opportunities, support services, policies, and administrative resources. Yet the breadth of these offerings also creates complexity.
Students are frequently expected to navigate information distributed across university websites, academic catalogs, policy documents, departmental pages, advising resources, student service offices, and other systems. Information may technically be available, but students may not know what to search for, which office is responsible, which requirements apply to their situation, or what sequence of steps they should take.
This creates a fundamental navigation problem: universities often organize information according to their own organizational structures, while students experience the institution through goals and questions that cut across those structures.
The challenge is to explore how AI could help students navigate this complexity more effectively and make informed decisions without requiring them to understand the university's organizational structure first.
Who experiences it?
The primary stakeholders are undergraduate and graduate students, particularly students who are new to an institution, exploring academic options, navigating transitions, or encountering unfamiliar academic or administrative processes.
The challenge also affects academic advisors, faculty, student affairs professionals, and administrative staff who frequently help students locate information and connect with the appropriate resources.
The problem can be especially significant for first-generation students and others who may enter higher education with less familiarity with university structures and terminology.
Why does it matter?
A university may provide excellent programs and services, but those resources have limited value if students cannot find or navigate them when needed.
Difficulty navigating institutional complexity can lead to missed opportunities, unnecessary delays, confusion about requirements, repeated referrals between offices, and increased administrative burden. More importantly, students may make academic or financial decisions without knowing that relevant resources or alternatives exist.
Improving navigation could make universities more accessible, responsive, and student centered while allowing advisors and staff to devote more time to situations that benefit from human judgment and relationship building.
What is the existing solution and/or what is hard about solving it today?
Universities rely on websites, search engines, FAQs, academic catalogs, advising offices, student portals, knowledge bases, and increasingly chatbots to help students find information.
The underlying challenge, however, is not simply information retrieval. A student's question may span several organizational areas and require understanding context, dependencies, policies, timing, and terminology.
Information also changes over time, similar questions may have different answers depending on a student's circumstances, and some situations require human judgment rather than an automated answer.
A successful approach therefore needs to do more than retrieve information. It must help users navigate interconnected information while maintaining accuracy, transparency, appropriate escalation to humans, and clear identification of authoritative sources.
What would a better solution make possible?
A better solution could enable students to begin with their actual goal or situation rather than needing to know which university office, website, or policy governs it.
AI could potentially help students discover relevant resources, understand how different requirements relate to one another, identify questions they should be asking, and determine appropriate next steps while directing them to authoritative sources and human experts when necessary.
To explore this challenge, contact:
Lucy Bowen: Director, Administration - Lehigh University
Email: clb222@lehigh.edu