Episode 79: Chase Williams on Digital Hubs to Advance Institutional Strategy
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How can you go from disparate technology systems and student services to a unified, personalized, and interactive digital hub to better support students? How can these bring together the services and information students need to drive engagement and retention while saving time and reducing costs? What is the role of AI in supporting students? We dive into these questions and the digital transformation needed to make it all happen with Chase Williams, CEO and co-founder of Pathify.
In the modern landscape of higher education, students are navigating more than just their coursework. They are navigating a complex, often fragmented digital ecosystem. While they enjoy hyper-personalized, "consumer-grade" experiences on apps like Spotify and Instagram, their campus life often feels like a trip back in time to the era of link farms and paper forms.
Chase Williams, CEO and co-founder of Pathify, recently joined the Connected College Podcast to discuss how "Digital Hubs" are bridging this gap. By moving beyond the traditional portal, these hubs are driving institutional outcomes like belonging, retention, and cost reduction.
The Gap Between Consumer Expectations and Campus Reality
For most students, the digital world is intuitive. If you want to find a song on Spotify, you don’t click through a hierarchy of genres and artists; you search or follow an algorithmic nudge. However, many college portals still function as "link farms"—static pages full of URLs that aren't personalized to the individual user.
This fragmentation isn't just an aesthetic issue; it’s a success issue. When a student has to log into five different systems to check their financial aid, view their syllabus, or join a club, they experience "digital runaround." This complexity creates friction that can lead to disengagement.
What is a Digital Hub?
A digital hub acts as a "single pane of glass" for the entire institution. Unlike a traditional portal, which simply points to other places, a digital hub integrates data from various systems—like the Student Information System (SIS) and the Learning Management System (LMS)—to surface information exactly when it’s needed.
According to Williams, the "secret sauce" is the integration layer. By using middleware to connect 20-year-old legacy systems with a modern interface, institutions can nudge students toward critical actions, such as clearing a registration hold or attending a campus event that matches their interests.
Driving Retention Through Belonging and Personalization
Student success is often measured by retention and graduation rates, but these are lagging indicators. To impact them, institutions must focus on "proxies" for success: engagement and a sense of belonging.
Digital hubs support these goals by:
Scaffolding Information: Organizing tasks and deadlines so students aren't overwhelmed.
Hyper-Personalization: Showing content relevant to a student’s specific role, major, or interests.
Building Community: Connecting students to clubs, interest groups, and peers before they even arrive on campus.
In one example shared by Williams, an institution reduced account holds by 85% simply by surfacing the notification at the right time with a clear workflow to resolve it.
Controlling Costs and Reducing Complexity
In an era of tightening budgets and "federal government chaos," controlling costs is a strategic priority. Many institutions suffer from a "proliferation of digital stuff," owning multiple CRMs, chatbots, and calendars across different departments.
A unified digital hub allows colleges to consolidate their tech stack. By replacing four or five disparate systems with one hub, institutions not only save on licensing fees but also reduce the burden on IT staff. Furthermore, by moving student-facing content behind an authenticated "hub," colleges can shrink their public website footprint, making information easier to manage and more secure.
The Future: AI and the Agentic Experience
The next frontier for digital hubs is Artificial Intelligence. Williams notes that the goal isn't just to add a chatbot, but to create a "contextual layer." By connecting an LLM like Gemini to the institution's specific data, a student can ask, "What is my current balance?" or "When is my next class?" and receive a direct, authenticated answer.
This move toward an "agentic" experience means the technology doesn't just provide a link; it performs the task.
Conclusion: Leadership and the Path Forward
Technology is rarely the limiting factor in digital transformation; the real challenge is leadership and culture. To future-proof an institution, leaders must be "change agents" who communicate a clear vision repeatedly.
As higher education becomes increasingly hybrid and competitive, the institutions that thrive will be those that treat the digital experience as a core component of student success, rather than just an IT project.
Episode 79 Transcript
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Chase Williams: As we started to dig in, we understood a bit more about the history of institutions and how student services had been brought in and how many academic departments there were and how siloed they were naturally, and therefore the idea of connecting information and servicing it in a way that's hyper-personalized and across all of these different fragmented systems, doing that is a very challenging problem.
Elliot Felix: That was Chase Williams, CEO, and co-founder of the EdTech Company, Pathify. We had a great conversation about digital hubs and really digital transformation more broadly and how these improve the student experience. They save staff time, they reduce costs, and they drive institutional outcomes like belonging and retention. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. And if you're a leader in higher ed, and you think that the silos and separations get in the way of student success, then this podcast and my upcoming book, The Connected College, are for you. We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community, their coursework and their careers.
Elliot Felix: Welcome, Chase. I'm really excited for our conversation today about student experience and student success and the role that digital hubs can play in that.
Chase Williams: Yeah, me too. I know we've been trying to connect for a little while, so it's good to be chatting.
Elliot Felix: It's understandable. You're growing like crazy and I think creating real impact. So it's gonna be great for folks to learn more. And I think a great place to get started is learn how you did. Tell us a little bit about how you got started in higher ed and what you're up to today.
Chase Williams: It's a long-ish story at this point. I got started in higher ed as many people do as a student. I went to the University of Oregon for a couple of years and also attended Monash University out of Melbourne in Australia. Probably tell I'm not originally from the US and the background of founding story for Pathify is when James, my co-founder and I were at university, we noticed a pretty significant gap in how the apps we were using every day, like YouTube or Spotify or Instagram. Not only how they looked, but how they worked and the gap between that and what we were being offered at university.
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Chase Williams: To connect it specifically to retaining students or student success, the platform at the most fundamental level is better connecting a student with information, with updates and with the campus community. And all three of those things are proxies for student success. And you can have all the buzzwords that go with them, student engagement, sense of belonging or all of that sort of stuff.
Chase Williams: But, we have a good example from Pacific over the last year where just simply by surfacing that you have a hold on your account. Prior to full enrollment, they were able to reduce those holds before fall semesters started by 85%. That was nothing more than wow, servicing this at the right time and making sure it was available and providing the workflow to go through and take the hold off their account. So sometimes it is just like organizing information, scaffolding it personalizing it, bringing it nudging at the right time is a major part of student success and how we look to impact that.
Elliot Felix: Finding ways to connect students to information and each other I think is at the root of student success and the belonging, the engagement, the progress to degree that you're talking about, I think makes so much sense.
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Chase Williams: We are starting to connect to the controlling costs, strategic priority that institutions are really needing to think about. Not only, budgets have been tied at certain state levels for a long time, depending on the place. But now with a bit of the federal government chaos that's going on. Some other things that might be happening at state levels with budgeting. Like it's just something that pretty much everyone is starting to talk about or is talking about.
Chase Williams: So having a platform that is a single pane of glass that goes across the entire lifecycle and serves not just students, but prospects and alumni and parents or families. Of prospects and students and employees and faculty and staff as well. We have seen institutions that have taken down, like replaced fully, 4, 5, 6 systems with our platform. And not just that we are hearing more and more of like ways that they're reducing, not necessarily a whole system, but reducing costs because, with the pages component of our platform, 'cause you can house content there and point it towards students based on role and that kind of thing. They're shrinking their public website footprint and having less information that's just not directed at anyone.
Elliot Felix: And it's all in the old, it's in the kind of just in case model instead of the just in time model.
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Chase Williams: How are you connecting me with information in a more conversational way and how are you generating content on that my behalf? Whether that's like an email code or campaign, that sort of stuff. We've executed on the first side of it where, again, at our call we're trying to more quickly and more effectively connect the student or constituent with information. And so adding a chat bot, underpinned by ours is Gemini, next to the search bar.
Chase Williams: So it connects with that out of the box, but then we leverage all of the integrations in the integration layer. So for every integration we have, we're now starting to build like a chat bot connection, a connection from that integration to the chat bot so that when you asking about holds or you asking about finances or balances, are you asking about GPA or what's on my class schedule? It can be answering that kind of stuff as well.
Chase Williams: A big part of the differentiator for us will be is out of the box we're connected to 5, 10, 20 of your systems. And so we can start to integrate that into the chat experience as well. I think that gives us a leg up from, a lot of people are throwing around this term agent or agentic at the moment. All of that depends on the data.
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Chase Williams: The pace at which it changes for a given institution will come down as much to like leadership and culture as anything. When you work with an IT office and you work with people on staff that are bought into like we are future proofing the institution, and we're going like, we're on the path to creating an experience for 10 years from now, 20 years from now that we're starting to see that more and that is just a major part of it.
Elliot Felix: That's such a good observation because it's, sometimes the tool or the technology isn't the limiting factor, like the solution exists. It's do you have leadership, to make the bold decisions? Do you have the culture of continuous improvement and assessment where you can effectively adopt and implement?
Chase Williams: You need an innovative leader or someone who wants to be a change agent, but knows how to do it in a way where we're not transforming everything overnight. Here's the vision and then just vigorously. Over and over communicating what that is and making sure everyone's on the same page and every meeting you're stepping into and everyone's got the same sheet of paper that says, here's where we're going.
Elliot Felix: My rule of thumb is when you start to get sick of saying the same thing, you're probably just starting to say it enough. When you hear people say it back to you is when you're, you're probably getting close. Great stuff. Thanks Chase for all the insights and all the great work you're doing at Pathify.