Transforming the Graduate & Professional Student Experience
Today’s graduate students are navigating a landscape that looks markedly different from even a decade ago. They are balancing careers, families, financial pressures, and increasingly complex educational pathways. At the same time, institutions are grappling with demographic shifts, evolving workforce demands, new technologies, changes in funding models, enrollment challenges, and constrained resources. The result is an unfortunate paradox: graduate students need greater institutional support precisely when institutional attention and resources are increasingly directed elsewhere.
The undergraduate student success movement demonstrated that student achievement improves when institutions intentionally design experiences that promote learning, growth, belonging, and well-being. Graduate students deserve the same attention. Bringing graduate and professional students and educators into the student success conversation challenges institutions to design systems to better support students holistically.
With nearly three decades of leadership in undergraduate student success, the Gardner Institute is extending its focus to the graduate and professional student experience. As a facilitator and connector, the Institute brings together graduate students, educators, and researchers to exchange ideas, data, stories, and emerging practices. This collaboration creates opportunities for institutions to learn from one another and develop strategies that help students thrive from their first day of class to their first professional job.
A Welcome from the Gardner Institute’s CEO
Welcome, and thank you for visiting the Gardner Institute’s Graduate & Professional Student Experience Hub.
I am pleased to welcome you to this resource, which is intended to bring together people, research, institutional experience, student perspectives, and emerging practices focused on improving the graduate and professional student experience. My Gardner Institute colleagues and I see the Hub as a place for learning, connection, reflection, and exchange, one that can help make promising ideas and practices more visible while also creating opportunities to learn from the experiences of institutions and students themselves.
Graduate and professional education occupies an essential place within higher education, yet the experiences of graduate and professional students are extraordinarily varied. Their academic, personal, professional, and institutional journeys differ by discipline, degree type, institution, geography, career aspiration, and life circumstance. Understanding and improving those experiences therefore requires us to draw on many forms of knowledge and many different voices.
That is the purpose of this Hub. We want to connect what research tells us with what institutions are learning through practice, what faculty and staff experience in their work, and, importantly, what graduate and professional students themselves tell us about their lives, needs, aspirations, and experiences. We explicitly welcome graduate and professional students as contributors to this conversation, not simply as the subjects of research or recipients of institutional practice, but as partners whose perspectives are essential to understanding how graduate education can better serve those who pursue it.
The Hub is intended for everyone whose work touches the graduate student experience, including those who teach, advise, mentor, support, administer, research, or lead graduate and professional education, as well as graduate and professional students themselves. Our hope is that it will become a useful resource for people working across different institutional types, disciplines, roles, and professional contexts.
We welcome participation from across the United States and from around the world. Graduate and professional education is both national and international in scope, and institutions everywhere can benefit from learning across geographic, cultural, and educational boundaries. The Hub is intended to encourage that exchange and to create opportunities for ideas, experiences, and emerging practices to travel.
At the Gardner Institute, we believe meaningful improvement begins with understanding experience as it is actually lived and then connecting that understanding to evidence, practice, and action. We hope this Hub contributes to that work by helping people learn from one another, elevate promising approaches, ask better questions, and strengthen the experiences of graduate and professional students.
I hope you will experience the Graduate Student Experience Hub as an invitation: to explore, contribute, question, connect, and learn with others who share a commitment to helping graduate and professional students thrive.
We look forward to hearing from and learning with you!
In collaboration and common cause,
Drew
Andrew (Drew) K. Koch, PhD
Chief Executive Officer
John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Higher Education
Why graduate and professional students, and why now?
Office Hours with John Gardner.
Listen to our 200th episode!
For this special episode, John Gardner and Drew Koch explore why this work matters, discuss the new Graduate & Professional Student Experience Hub, and preview an upcoming book written for and by faculty, administrators, and staff working to improve the graduate student experience.
Join the Conversation: Join the Exchange.
Are you ready to engage with graduate school students, faculty, staff, and leaders to share ideas and learn from one another? The Gardner Institute offers an exchange where that conversation can unfold. Our LinkedIn group is a community space where you can connect with others to explore research, emerging practices, and institutional approaches that help us better understand, improve, and transform the graduate and professional student experience.
Exchange
The Exchange provides a public space for graduate and professional school faculty, deans, staff, researchers, and other practitioners to engage with each other to share emerging ideas, research, institutional perspectives, and emerging practices that support and transform the graduate and professional student experience.
In this collaborative network, the Gardner Institute and graduate education leaders bring critical thought leadership to the field of graduate education, connecting research to the realities institutions are navigating right now.
Explore Ideas Shaping the Graduate & Professional Student Experience
Insights & Resources
Change happens best when institutions work with and learn from each other. The Gardner Institute brings together graduate deans, faculty, student affairs professionals, and researchers through conferences, symposium, and workshop tracks, and future learning opportunities designed to build shared knowledge and practical strategies.
The graduate and professional student experience is shaped not by any one program or office, but by the systems, environments, relationships, and experiences students encounter throughout their journey.
Engage
The conversation about graduate and professional student success is evolving quickly. Educators must ask new questions about what students need and how institutional practices must evolve to support their success. The Gardner Institute offers this hub where that conversation can unfold.
Visit Events & Convenings to find upcoming opportunities to learn alongside colleagues from across the country.
Symposium on Transforming the Postsecondary Experience
October 14-15, 2026 in Indianapolis, IN. Join the Transforming the Graduate Student Experience Track. This workshop focuses on transforming systems through structured institutional self‑study and evidence‑informed improvement.
Call for Proposals for the Graduate Student Experience Convening
We invite proposals from educators and people who are passionate about improving the graduate experience so that every student can flourish and finish their graduate degree. The Graduate Student Experience Conference takes place in April 2027, at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The deadline to submit proposals is October 15, 2026.
Graduate Student Experience: Reimagining Graduate Education
Innovating for a New Era, April 12-14, 2027 in Atlanta, GA. Join national leaders exploring the future of graduate and professional education and advancing student success from prospect to professional.
Transforming the Graduate Student Experience: A Call to Expand the Student Success Imperative
Coming in January from Johns Hopkins Press.
Developed by the Gardner Institute and many colleagues.
Pre-order Here
Stay Connected
The Graduate & Professional Student Experience initiative is growing.
Sign up to receive updates on new research, upcoming convenings, and the release of Transforming the Graduate Student Experience. Be among the first to know as new resources become available.
Non-Proprietary Statement
The resources, ideas, and materials shared through the Graduate & Professional Student Experience initiative are intended to support broad learning, collaboration, and institutional improvement across higher education. Unless otherwise noted, materials are provided for educational and professional purposes and may be shared, adapted, and used to support efforts to improve the graduate and professional student experience with appropriate acknowledgment of the source.