By William Canty
Colleges are spending more than ever to support students, yet the results remain troublingly flat. Nationwide, only about six in ten students complete their bachelor’s degrees within six years. Graduation gaps persist by race, income, and first-generation status. The usual fixes: more tutors, more advisors, and more dashboards aren’t moving the needle fast enough.
It is time we admit we are missing something fundamental. The problem is not just academic. It is cognitive.
Executive function, the brain’s ability to plan, focus, remember, and self-regulate, has quietly become one of the most important and least understood drivers of student success. If we are serious about improving outcomes in higher education, we need to make it a central part of how we support students.
A recent Bain & Company report, Beating the Odds, analyzed more than 1,200 institutions and highlighted a handful that are dramatically outperforming expectations on student retention and graduation. These schools did not achieve success through prestige or endowment size. Instead, they implemented coordinated support systems, relied on real-time data, and held themselves accountable for results.
But beneath that organizational rigor is a human truth. None of these strategies work unless students have the internal skills to respond to them.
At Novella Prep, we have seen this play out firsthand. Students do not fail because they are not intelligent. They fail because they cannot manage their time, remember what they read, or adapt when plans change. These are executive function deficits, and they are surprisingly common, even among students with high GPAs or test scores.
In pilot programs at public universities, students identified as having executive function challenges received individualized coaching within the first month of classes. The result? A 12 percent increase in fall-to-spring retention, at a fraction of the cost of traditional tutoring. That is not just an intervention. That is infrastructure.
Executive function is not a new idea. Psychologists and neuroscientists have studied it for decades, and many K–12 educators now incorporate it into their teaching. But higher education has been slow to catch up, treating students as if they arrive fully formed and ready to self-regulate. That assumption ignores developmental science, and it leaves too many students behind.
The good news is that executive function can be taught, measured, and improved. It is not destiny. It is a skill.
We are entering an era when the content of college degrees may matter less than how students learn, adapt, and perform in a world of constant change. Executive function is the foundation for those abilities. It is the difference between knowing what to do and being able to do it.
If colleges want to improve outcomes, close equity gaps, and prepare students for life beyond the classroom, they should start by looking inward. Not at their budgets, but at their students’ brains.
About the Author
William Canty is affiliated with Novella Prep, an academic performance company focused on executive function and student outcomes.