Key takeaways:
- 85% of students experiencing academic challenges won't seek help, even when they know support exists.
- Early alert systems catch students who are visibly failing. They miss the "murky middle," (students with a 2.0-3.0 GPA) who are quietly struggling.
- 45% of students who leave in their first two years do so because of what they learn about their own academic ability.
- First-gen students, working students, and student parents all drop out at disproportionately higher rates after the same academic setback.
- Closing this gap means finding a way to reach students before they disengage, not after.
Why don't struggling students ask for help?
Picture a sophomore at a community college. She's carrying 12 credit hours, working 28 hours a week, and looking after her younger sibling two evenings a week. She's falling behind in two of her four classes. She's tired, she's worried, and she hasn't told anyone.
She won't book an advising appointment, because that would mean admitting out loud that she's struggling. Not that she could make it anyway. She works during every advising office hour. She won't get flagged by an early alert system either, because on paper, she's fine: 2.8 GPA, not failing, not thriving, attending every class.
She's flying under the radar. Not because institutions aren’t watching, but because support systems are built to catch a different kind of student.
This is the reality for 85% of students experiencing academic challenges. They know support exists. They simply won't ask for it.
Why do early alert systems miss the students who need help most?
Early alert systems are designed to catch students who are visibly failing. Those who are missing class, failing assessments, falling behind on tuition. That's a real and necessary function but it leaves an enormous gap.
EAB refers to this 2.0-3.0 GPA band as the "murky middle." These are students who attend, who try, who never trigger a flag, and who won't respond to proactive outreach even when it reaches them. Research from College Board backs this up, showing that 21% of students with a 2.5-3.0 GPA still drop out.
This is where retention strategy quietly becomes an equity problem too. First-gen students are 5% more likely to drop out after a grade setback than their peers facing the same event. Working students are 20% less likely to complete their degree. 61% of student fathers drop out. Same academic event, disproportionate outcome, and none of it visible to a system built to flag GPA.
Colleges are already investing heavily in advising infrastructure and early alert tools. The question isn't whether that investment is working. It's who it was ever designed to reach. Students who most need support are the least likely to enter the system at all, which means no amount of advisor capacity solves this on its own.
Is student dropout really an academic problem?
Research from Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner found that 45% of dropout in the first two years of college comes down to what students learn about their own academic performance, not because they're actually failing their classes.
That distinction matters for how institutions think about retention and persistence. A student in the murky middle isn't dropping out because the material is too hard. They're dropping out because they’ve started to believe they don't belong, and no one has given them a reason to think otherwise.
Students don't avoid support because they don't know it exists. Every institution has a website, an advising office, a support line. They avoid it because asking for help feels like admitting failure, and for a first-gen student or one who's already stretched thin, that admission can feel like proof they don't belong here at all.
What would it take to reach these struggling students?
Not another alert. Not another outreach campaign asking a student to respond. The research points to something more specific; a moment where a student can engage on their own terms, without first having to admit they need help.
Research from Goemans and Kapinos found that students with even one academic advising touchpoint persist at an 18 percentage point higher rate.
That's a meaningful number, but it raises the harder question every VP of Student Success has probably already asked: how do you create that touchpoint for a student who won't book an appointment, won't respond to outreach, and won't walk into an office during the hours it's open?
It's not a caseload problem. Advisors can't manufacture that moment at scale for students who were never going to raise their hand in the first place. It has to happen somewhere else, on the student's terms, before they’ve decided they don't belong.
What does closing the gap look like in practice?
A number of institutions have started to see what happens when students in the murky middle get a low-stakes way to engage, one that doesn't ask them to declare they're struggling first.
At Volunteer State Community College, 1,150 students became visible to their student services team in a single semester, simply by using Genio Notes that didn't require them to ask for anything.
At SUNY Canton, students who engaged this way saw a 169% greater GPA increase than those who didn't. Genio's 2026 Learner Impact Report found similar patterns among first-gen students and students already flagged as at-risk.
The pattern across all of it is the same. The students who benefit most are the ones who were hardest to reach in the first place.
Where does this leave student success leaders?
Most retention infrastructure, early alert systems, advising appointments, outreach campaigns, is built around students who signal that they need help.
That infrastructure is necessary, and it's not going anywhere. But it was never going to catch the 85% who don't signal.
The real question isn't whether the current systems work for the students they were built for. It's what you're doing for the students who never show up in them at all.
Closing that gap isn't about adding advising headcount or building a new support program from scratch. It's about finding a way to reach students before they disengage, not after, and it's a problem worth spending time on before it shows up in next year's completion numbers.
