Half of the students at Landmark College began their college careers somewhere else and didn’t succeed. It’s because the systems they entered were not designed for how they learn.
That reality is forcing a broader reckoning across higher education. A growing number of leaders are confronting an uncomfortable truth: many of the barriers students face are not individual deficits, but the result of systems built around a narrow definition of learning.
In response, colleges and universities are beginning to move beyond patchwork support models toward a more fundamental shift, treating student success not as a set of services but as a design challenge embedded in the structure of the institution itself.
For decades, higher education has relied on a layered approach to student support, including tutoring centers, advising offices, and increasing disability accommodations. While these services remain essential, they are often disconnected from the core design of the academic experience.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 20% of undergraduates report having a disability, including learning and attention-related conditions. At the same time, retention and completion gaps persist, particularly for those navigating executive function challenges, inconsistent academic preparation, or disengagement.
At the University of Utah Academic Innovation and Intelligence Lab, a cross-functional team is working to identify where students struggle and intervene before those challenges escalate. By combining institutional research, predictive analytics, design thinking, and AI-enabled tools, the lab operates as a centralized engine for experimentation and implementation.
Rather than launching isolated pilot programs, the lab focuses on scalable interventions, redesigning high-failure courses, building AI-guided advising systems, and creating real-time feedback loops that allow faculty to adjust instruction based on student experience. The goal is not simply to help students navigate existing systems, but to redesign them so fewer fall behind in the first place.
Neurodiversity and Higher Education
Nowhere are these design challenges more visible than in the experiences of neurodivergent students. At Landmark, one of the nation’s leading institutions dedicated to students with learning differences such as dyslexia, ADHD, and executive function challenges, the academic model is built entirely around cognitive diversity.
“Higher education assumes students arrive ready and more or less in the same place,” said Landmark President Jim Dlugos. “We know that’s not true.”
Dlugos, who returned from retirement to lead Landmark in 2025 after nearly four decades in higher education, said traditional models tend to prioritize disciplinary content while placing learning needs in a secondary position. That approach can create significant barriers for students whose learning processes differ from institutional norms, particularly as the volume and pace of academic work increases.
Traditionally, accessibility has largely been addressed through accommodations. “Accommodations are the marker that we still haven’t built the world right yet,” Dlugos said. In most institutions, they focus on inputs such as providing alternative formats for course materials or extending time on exams. While these supports can be helpful, they do not address how neurodivergent students process information, manage tasks, or engage with learning itself.
Research published in Studies in Higher Education has found that accommodation-based models often place the burden on students to adapt to rigid systems rather than prompting institutions to reevaluate those systems.
At Landmark, the approach is different. The goal is not to retrofit access, but to design environments where fewer accommodations are necessary because obstacles have been reduced from the outset.
Designing for Variability
This approach aligns with the principles of Universal Design for Learning, a framework developed by CAST, a nonprofit organization focused on making learning accessible and effective for all students that encourages educators to create flexible learning environments that accommodate a wide range of learners.
At Landmark, that philosophy is embedded across the curriculum. All first-year students take a foundational course, Perspectives in Learning, which focuses on helping them understand how they learn and develop strategies for self-advocacy. Advising is frequent and individualized, with an emphasis on executive functioning skills such as time management, organization, and metacognition.
Classroom environments are also intentionally designed to support variability. In a typical college classroom, students sit in rows under fluorescent lights and are expected to remain still and focused for extended periods. At Landmark, classrooms look and feel different with flexible layouts, varied seating options, and lighting designed to reduce sensory strain because even small design choices matter.
“Most classrooms reflect unacknowledged assumptions about learning,” Dlugos said. “Even something as simple as where the door is placed can affect how a student engages.”
Placing doors at the back of the room, for example, allows students to move without disrupting the class, an important consideration for those who need physical movement to maintain focus.
The college is also constructing a new academic building designed using neuro-inclusive principles, with students involved in decisions about furniture, lighting, and spatial design.
Scaling High-Touch Models
While Landmark offers a compelling model, scaling this approach across larger institutions presents challenges. One of the most significant is cost.
“This is high-touch, human-intensive work,” Dlugos said. “And that has implications for staffing and resources.”
Landmark maintains a student-to-staff ratio of approximately 3-to-1, a level of support that is difficult for many colleges and universities to replicate. That reality highlights a central question in higher education: how to design more human-centered systems in an environment increasingly driven by efficiency and cost control. Innovation labs and data-driven strategies offer one potential path forward.
By identifying patterns in student performance and engagement, institutions can target interventions more effectively, focusing resources where they will have the greatest impact. At the University of Utah, predictive analytics tools help identify students at risk of falling behind, allowing advisors to intervene earlier. Course redesign efforts focus on high-failure “gateway” courses, where small changes can significantly improve retention.
These approaches do not replace human interaction, but they can make it more strategic and scalable.
The Role of Advising and Faculty Development
Experts point to advising and faculty development as critical levers for improving student success. At Landmark, students meet regularly with advisors to discuss how they are learning, where they are struggling, and what strategies can help them succeed.
“Advising can’t just be about course registration,” Dlugos said. “It has to be about understanding how students are learning.”
Faculty development is equally important. Many institutions are beginning to invest in training that helps faculty understand neurodiversity and adopt more inclusive teaching practices. The Landmark College Institute for Research and Training works with colleges and universities nationwide to provide professional development focused on neuro-inclusive pedagogy.
A Broader Innovation Strategy
For many institutions, the implications of this work extend beyond neurodivergent students. Designing for cognitive diversity can improve clarity, flexibility, and engagement in ways that benefit all learners, including those who may not identify as neurodivergent but still struggle within traditional models. In this sense, neurodiversity is not just a student support issue. It is an innovation strategy.
As higher education navigates financial pressures, enrollment shifts, and increasing demands for accountability, the ability to design systems that support a wide range of learners will become increasingly important. Innovation labs and neuro-inclusive models offer complementary approaches, one focused on institutional infrastructure, the other on human-centered design.
Together, they point toward a future in which student success is not an add-on service or office, but a built-in feature of the educational experience. For institutions willing to rethink long-standing assumptions, the opportunity is clear. Designing for students whose needs differ from traditional systems does more than close gaps—it reveals a better model of learning itself.
The question is no longer whether higher education can afford to redesign its systems. It’s whether it can afford not to.
