Four in ten students who start college don't finish — and it's usually not about grades. Elliot Felix explains what separates the colleges that set students up to thrive from the ones that don't, and how families can tell the difference before they ever enroll.

Elliot Felix trained as a designer at UVA and MIT and has spent 20 years helping more than 100 colleges — from MIT and Cornell to NYU and UVA — redesign the spaces, services, and systems students rely on. He's the author of two books: How to Get the Most Out of College and, most recently, The Connected College: Leadership Strategies for Student Success.

This episode will be the season finale. See you again in the fall.

What we cover:

Elliot starts with why students leave — about half for financial reasons, and a lot of the rest because they never feel they belong. From there, the experiences that reliably predict success: learning communities, working with faculty, internships, mentoring, and semester-long projects — and why it matters whether a school requires those things or leaves them to chance. We get into "connected" versus "siloed" colleges (duplicate tutoring centers, turf wars, the bright line between academic and student affairs), the difference between good friction that helps you grow and bad friction that just gets in the way, and where AI fits — useful for cutting bureaucracy and tier-one advising, but no substitute for the relationships that keep students in school. He closes with how to read a college like an open book: the College Scorecard, IPEDS, a school's own institutional research dashboards, and whether they actually report progress against their strategic plan.

What Parents Should Ask:

• Are high-impact experiences like internships, capstones, learning communities required, or just available?
• How do the career center and academic departments actually work together?
• Is there a one-stop for student services, or does my kid get the runaround across offices?
• Does the school report progress against its strategic plan — or did the plan get written and shelved?
• Do they describe what they offer in plain English, or in insider jargon you have to decode?

Find Elliot:

LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliotfelix/

Website — https://www.elliotfelix.com/

Find Ringae:

Website — https://waysmith.io/

Book a discovery call — https://cal.com/waysmith/discovery-call

Sign up for my newsletter — https://waysmith.io/#newsletter