By Dra. Loida González Utley, Acting Director of Advising and Retention, Texas A&M University – Central Texas, and Inaugural Conference Director for The Assembly
A few weeks ago, I found myself rewatching Selena. Not because I had extra time on my hands—anyone working in higher education right now knows that’s not a thing—but because there is a scene in that movie that has stayed with me for years.
You probably know the one. Selena’s father talks about the challenge of being Mexican American. You have to be Mexican enough for Mexicans and American enough for Americans. You live between two worlds, constantly navigating expectations from both sides. As a first-generation immigrant from Mexico, that scene has always resonated with me. This time, however, I heard something different.
Instead of thinking about culture and identity, I started thinking about students.
Many of our students live between worlds, too. They move between community colleges and universities, military service and civilian life, work and school, family responsibilities and academic aspirations. Some stop out and return years later. Others transfer multiple times before completing a credential. Their educational journeys rarely follow the neat, linear pathways our institutions were originally designed to support.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that perhaps the challenge isn’t that students live between worlds. The challenge is that we’ve built systems that require them to navigate those worlds on their own.
Recently, I stepped away from my role leading Recruitment and Enrollment Services and into a new role as Acting Director of Advising and Retention. Since then, I’ve been joking with colleagues that this is my crossover album.
Selena fans will appreciate the reference. Her dream was to create an album that would bridge audiences and bring different worlds together. It wasn’t about abandoning one audience for another; it was about finding a way to connect them. In a much less glamorous way, that’s exactly what this transition has felt like.
What has surprised me most is how little actually changed. The students are the same. The questions are remarkably similar. The barriers are often identical. The student who struggles to understand transfer credit before enrolling is often the same student struggling to stay on track after enrolling. The student worried about affordability during recruitment is often the same student making persistence decisions a year later. The student who needs clarity before admission is usually the same student who needs clarity before graduation.
Only the office changed. That realization keeps leading me back to a question that has become increasingly difficult to ignore:
Why are we siloed anyway?
To be fair, I understand how we got here. Higher education grew, became more complex, and developed specialized functions. Registrars became experts in records and policy. Financial aid professionals became experts in regulation and compliance. Admissions professionals focused on access and enrollment. Advisors focused on pathways and student planning. Student affairs professionals focused on belonging, engagement, and development.
There is nothing inherently wrong with specialization. In fact, it has allowed our institutions to serve students at scale. The problem is that somewhere along the way, specialization quietly became separation. While we continued dividing ourselves into offices, departments, and reporting structures, students continued experiencing their education as a single journey.
Students do not experience our organizational chart. They experience us.
They experience the handoff between admissions and advising. They experience the transfer evaluation process. They experience receiving different answers from different offices. They experience the frustration of having to tell their story over and over again. Most importantly, they experience the consequences when our systems fail to connect.
At a time when public confidence in higher education is being questioned, when students and families are scrutinizing the value of a degree, and when institutions are facing enrollment pressures alongside growing numbers of stopped-out students, those disconnects matter. Every confusing process matters. Every unnecessary handoff matters. Every moment a student feels like they are navigating our institution alone matters.
This is one of the reasons I find myself so energized by conversations around learning mobility. At its core, learning mobility acknowledges something many of us have known for years: students no longer move through education in straight lines. They earn credit from multiple institutions, learn through military service and workforce experiences, pause their education, and return when life allows. Their pathways are dynamic, yet many of our structures remain surprisingly static.
The irony is that while students have become increasingly mobile, many institutions remain firmly planted in place. We often ask students to adapt to our structures rather than asking whether our structures should adapt to them.
My recent transition has also reinforced something else. AACRAO professionals are uniquely positioned to help bridge these gaps. Throughout our careers, we develop skills that transcend our job titles. We understand pathways, systems, policy, process improvement, and student behavior. We understand how seemingly small barriers can create significant obstacles for students.
Those are not only registrar skills, enrollment management skills, or advising skills, but also student success skills.
As institutions continue to focus on retention, student success, and learning mobility, AACRAO professionals have an opportunity to become even stronger strategic partners. Not by staying in our lanes, but by helping connect them.
- What might happen if enrollment managers spent more time understanding advising?
- What if registrars were included in student success conversations from the beginning?
- What if student affairs professionals and enrollment professionals mapped the student journey together?
- What if we stopped asking whose responsibility something is and started asking how we might solve it together?
Perhaps this is higher education’s crossover album moment.
For decades, we have organized ourselves around specialized expertise, and that expertise remains valuable. But today’s students are asking for something more. They are asking for connection. They are asking for clarity. They are asking for an educational experience that feels seamless rather than segmented.
Quite frankly, they don’t need us to wait until we’ve designed the perfect system. Higher education has a tendency to fall in love with perfection. We love strategic plans, committees, task forces, and redesign efforts. Meanwhile, students are trying to register for classes, transfer credits, understand financial aid, balance work and family responsibilities, and decide whether continuing their education is worth the effort.
Students don’t need perfection. They need progress.
More importantly, they need institutions willing to acknowledge where friction exists and work collaboratively to remove it. They need professionals willing to take ownership of the spaces between departments. They need leaders who see the student journey as a shared responsibility rather than a collection of individual tasks.
Perhaps that is why the Selena story resonates with me now more than ever. She understood that people living between worlds didn’t need someone to tell them which world they belonged to. They needed someone willing to connect those worlds.
Our students are living between worlds, too.
Between institutions and opportunities. Between life and learning. Between stopping out and starting again. Between aspiration and achievement.
The question is not whether they can navigate those spaces. Many already are. The question is whether we are willing to meet them there.
Because if there is one lesson higher education can learn from Selena, it is this: the future does not belong to those who choose one world over another. It belongs to those willing to build bridges between them.
And if we are serious about student success, learning mobility, and the future of higher education, it’s time we started building.
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