Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. I'm David Hinson and I serve as Campus CIO for Bolden Networks for Higher Education. Welcome to Control Alt Lead. This fall I was fortunate to present Bolden Network's latest campus Connectivity report at the annual EDUCOS Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Our report is conducted annually and anonymously surveys undergraduates across the US about their lived experiences with connectivity on campus and how it affects their studies, their living, and their well being. Additionally, we survey the number and types of devices they carry while at school, how critically important they hold reliable connectivity and its impact on their academic success, and just how serious they believe campus leadership is in investing adequately to support always on, always there infrastructure necessary to enable ubiquitous and reliable connectivity. If you take away nothing else from this report, then let it be Connectivity is core infrastructure as fundamental as power, resources, water, and safety. It shapes how students learn, how faculty teach, and how staff run the institution 24 hours a day in dorms, in classrooms, in labs, in stadiums, and in all the spaces in between. Treat it like anything less and you'll feel it viscerally in your learning outcomes. Student well Being and Campus Satisfaction the methodology behind our report is straightforward. We surveyed 1,087 students and 250 full time non IT staff at US public and private universities during the spring of 2025. So these aren't edge case anecdotes. This is a representative signal from the very folks who rely upon your network every day. Let's start with where our students live in their residence halls. A campus climate pressure cooker. Nearly three quarters of students say consistent Internet access in their dorm is essential, but only about a quarter are very satisfied. That's a 47 point gap, and that gap is where late assignments, stress and disengagement live. More than two thirds have trouble connecting to multiple devices. Over 70% have resorted to mobile data or personal hotspots just to function. And four in five dorm residents reported at least one significant connectivity issue in the past year. Those aren't just hiccups, those are fundamental failure points. The Takeaway Dorm WI fi is not simply a nice to have. It is literally your front line of student satisfaction. If you're not measuring and managing it with the rigor of a utility, you're leaving learning and loyalty on the table. Now let's shift to classrooms, lecture halls, labs and offices where your core academic mission happens. Here's the headline. Only 16% of students consider campus Internet extremely reliable, and just one in five say they're very satisfied overall. Meanwhile, nearly three quarters of students and over six in ten staff see disruptions multiple times per month, with roughly a quarter experiencing issues weekly. The impact is direct 84% of students say poor Internet affects their schoolwork, while 86% of staff say it disrupts their jobs. I've said it before, when staff satisfaction outshines student satisfaction, it often signals that administrative networks are being prioritized over residential networks deemed to be more mission critical and thus making students feel unseen and ignored. That gap is a choice, one we can fix with better segmentation, quality of service policies, and capacity planning that best aligns to academic mission, student success and network traffic patterns. Now let's look at our campus venues. Large venues such as stadiums, arenas and auditoriums are your campus brand made real. If the network collapses in those spaces, it's as if the lights are suddenly turned off on your campus's very front porch. Nearly 4 in 10 students report connectivity problems in their campus venues, and it seems staff similarly mirror that experience. Students say they can't text, post on social media or even make calls. A quarter couldn't open their digital event tickets. That's not only a lost fan moment, a lost memory, it's potentially a lost entry to the event itself. A campus venue's connectivity is marketing, safety and student engagement all rolled into one. Therefore, design your venue network like it's a mini city with dedicated capacity neutral host strategies and real time monitoring during events. Campus connectivity gaps aren't uniform. Female students report higher expectations within residence halls but lower satisfaction rates than males, yielding a 58% satisfaction gap for women versus 34% for men. Women also report more stress and longer time on schoolwork due to unreliable connectivity, while men are more likely to vote with their feet, moving off campus or going public with their complaints. Therefore, treat network quality as an equity issue. Design your environment to detect and address disparities by building, by building type and by user cohort. And don't just address the average, but measure and remediate with distinct user communities in mind. Only 27% of students believe administrators view reliable Internet as extremely important, 30% think universities are underinvesting, and 71% say they'll report or complain if reliability fails. Pair that with the reality that over a third are less than satisfied with IT support and you have both a problem with perception and actual service delivery. Not a great place to be Many of our IT teams are stuck in a reactive and seemingly perpetual break fix cycle. Managed services can be precisely the lever you need to allow you to punch above your weight, stabilizing your technology platform so that your in house, experts can shift from firefighting to innovation. That's not outsourcing responsibility, it's insourcing outcomes. Now here's the hopeful despite frustrations, the appetite for the amenities of a smart campus is near universal, with 96% of students wanting enhanced digitally connected experiences. The top asks real time study space availability, current parking availability, and timely outage alerts. Students especially want real time laundry monitoring, a seemingly small perk on the surface, but outsized in signaling an expectation of seamless ambient student services. The prereq for all the preceding is entirely non negotiable. Students and staff demand a fast, reliable and future ready network. Remember, stabilize first, then scale. Now let's bring all this home. Nearly three quarters of students experience disruptions multiple times per month. More than four in five say that poor connectivity impacts their schoolwork, and almost as many say it affects their personal well being. A mere 16% call campus Internet extremely reliable. We clearly have much work to do. Those schools that act boldly to close their connectivity satisfaction gaps will reap student success, student retention, and student well being. And those that don't, they'll feel it most acutely through dropping enrollments, damaged reputations and shrinking budgets. The call to action is crystal clear and right in front of us. Act boldly to close the campus connectivity gap. Thanks for listening and I'll see you soon. This week's episode uses an AI voice clone trained upon hours of my natural speaking voice. While the voice you hear today is cloned, the words, thoughts and ideas here are 100% my own.