Some Places Aren't for Learning: Reclaiming Mental Energy for the Classroom

In the hallowed halls of academia, the word "customer" is often met with a collective shudder. We prefer to view our students as scholars, intellectual peers, and members of the community. However, at Gustavus Adolphus College, Dr. Sarah Ruble, Professor of Religion and former Associate Provost, is challenging higher education leaders to rethink this traditional line of thinking.

A few years ago, the college began developing learning outcomes for offices across campus, operating under the philosophy that every interaction was a learning opportunity. However, this approach missed a critical nuance. Dr. Ruble believes that leaders must differentiate between where on campus students are simply students, and where they are customers.

Allowing Students to Focus Their Energy Where it Matters Most

Dr. Ruble’s approach is rooted in the idea of intellectual bandwidth. If the goal of higher education is to ask students to grapple with difficult topics and challenges, institutions must prioritize the mental energy spent in the classroom over the energy spent navigating bureaucracy.

In an opinion piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dr. Ruble noted, “Some places on campus are not really for learning. They are for the transactions an institution needs to perform in order to provide an education.” Just as an adult isn't expected to be an expert in car mechanics during a yearly service visit, students shouldn't have to be experts in "college-speak" to graduate.

“Thinking about where your students are students and where they are customers can make your campus easier to navigate so students can spend their mental energies where it matters most,” Ruble explains. While the classroom is a space to be challenged and stretched, the registrar's office should be a space where "students just need someone to help them fill out the form and then send them off to class."

When Fewer Interactions Equals Better Service

To get the inside scoop on how Gustavus Adolphus operationalizes this philosophy, AcOps sat down with Dr. Ruble. During her time as Associate Provost, Dr. Ruble also briefly served as the Interim Registrar and used this as an opportunity to shift the office's focus from learning outcomes to student satisfaction indicators.

She explained: “The metrics became more immediate. They were timely.” For example, immediately after registration the registrar’s office sent a brief survey to students about their registration experience. Questions focused on the accessibility of the registrar’s office, students’ experience with the office, and broader concerns such as whether students could get into the classes they needed. Dr. Ruble emphasized that “These kinds of metrics became much more central to how we thought about how well we were doing.”

Under her leadership, the registrar’s office also prioritized a digital-first approach to reduce the number of times students need to physically come to the office. Up until the 2023-24 academic year, major and minor declarations required paper forms and multiple signatures across campus. Ruble pushed to move these processes online, stating, “We wanted students to have to come to our office as infrequently as possible.”

Another major initiative shifted the time that registration occurred. Registration was moved to the morning so students could get immediate answers to their questions while staff were in the office. As Ruble puts it, "offices aren't closed when they [students] need them."

Students Don’t Compartmentalize Their Experiences. You Shouldn’t Either.

The same mechanisms that allow students to make fewer visits to the registrar’s office aren’t just beneficial to students. When administrative time is freed from the burden of manual, repetitive work, staff can pivot toward high-impact, strategic initiatives. For Dr. Ruble, this means thinking beyond departmental boundaries. Rather than defining an office by its internal tasks, Ruble advocates for a holistic, campus-wide navigation ecosystem that prioritizes how a student moves through the college as a whole.

“How do we help students navigate together? My processes don't need to be special just for me. Are there things that we can help with, where there may be overlaps, or where students can walk into any office and get this question answered,” she asks. This shift requires a fundamental change in institutional perspective: moving from siloed operations to a focus on the holistic student experience.

“For students, it isn't necessarily, ‘I had a good experience here and a bad experience here.’ They think about it as the college supporting them. So if that's how they're thinking about it, it makes sense for us to think about it in the same sort of way. What is the total student experience here?”

Strategic focus area examples include:

• Universal Entry Points: Creating similar ways to contact or schedule appointments across all departments, rather than maintaining disparate, confusing systems.
• Integrated Navigation Centers: Implementing welcome desks with trained staff and students who can provide clear directions for those without an intuitive sense of where to go.
• Definitive Answer Authorization: Training staff to confidently provide definitive answers on high-frequency questions (e.g., credit requirements for full-time status or overload fees) across multiple offices so students aren't bounced between buildings.

Your Policies Don’t Just Confuse Students

Behind the soft glow of their laptop screens, students face additional barriers that often go unseen: navigating the labyrinth of “college-speak.” For every office that they will (hopefully) only come into contact with a handful of times, students encounter a laundry list of terms like repeatable courses, FERPA, and general education. The terms created to better serve students are often foreign to the very people they are meant to serve.

Dr. Ruble emphasizes that this language barrier often extends to the faculty as well. “You assume faculty speak the college language so you keep talking to them in that way as you’re trying to adjust language for students. That's probably a bad assumption. The language should be the same. Everyone should be looking at the same words.” This is particularly critical for institutions that rely on faculty advisors to guide students.

By simplifying policy language in catalogs and emails, the institution ensures that "when faculty and students are meeting together, they're trying to parse the same things." This consistency is especially vital as faculty often live through more policy changes than students. “They can be remembering something accurate, but something accurate from two years ago” Ruble reflects.

Efficiency as Empathy: Trading Manual Work for Personalized Support

There is a common fear in academia that treating administrative processes as "transactional" is cold or impersonal. Dr. Ruble argues the opposite: efficiency is a form of empathy that creates space for deeper connection.

By moving from paper to electronic systems, staff are no longer bogged down by data entry. “You haven't been keying in things individually for each student. You haven't been getting the same set of questions from students that you've had to answer again and again. It builds in the places or the time for those more detailed and personalized conversations that some students end up needing,” she explains.

Ultimately, Dr. Ruble’s work illustrates that transactional does not have to mean impersonal. Instead, making the administrative experience as efficient as possible allows staff to "really have the time to be what the student needs them to be." By treating the administrative side of campus as a service-oriented arm, institutions give students back the time and energy needed to become learners the moment they step into the classroom.