Our Services
What We Do
With extensive hands-on experience in change management, data, and technology, we craft tailored, co-designed strategies that deliver tangible results. Below are our core service offerings. Contact us to discuss how we can support your goals.
We organize our services into three areas, but we don't believe in off-the-shelf solutions. Whether you need help with AI, student experience, research, or something that spans all three, we'll design an engagement that fits. Scroll to learn more about our work.
AI Strategy and Readiness
Our Approach: AI as an Enabler of Human-Centered Practice
We don't believe AI alone will directly change student outcomes. We believe AI can free faculty and staff from transactional work so they have time for the high-impact human practices that do change outcomes: knowing students' names, being mentally present in advising appointments, building relationships that help students persist, reaching out to students before they are in crisis. Our research shows that institutions often adopt new tools without the infrastructure, training, or culture to use them well. This leads to initiative fatigue, underutilization, and missed opportunities.
T3 Advisory helps higher education institutions and systems navigate AI adoption with clarity, intentionality, and a focus on what matters most: enabling the human practices that drive student success. We believe AI's greatest value isn't replacing people. It's freeing them to do the high-impact human work that changes student outcomes. Our approach centers on practical readiness, stakeholder alignment, and sustainable implementation that fits your institutional reality.
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Where are you starting from?
Before investing in AI tools or initiatives, institutions need an honest picture of their current state. Not where they think they should be, but where they actually are.
Our AI Readiness Assessment provides:
Institutional readiness survey customized to your context (single institution or multi-campus system)
Leadership and stakeholder interviews to surface barriers, opportunities, and organizational culture factors
Gap analysis examining governance, infrastructure, training capacity, and data readiness
Benchmarked findings with prioritized recommendations for your next steps
This assessment is designed to inform strategic decisions, not sell you on a predetermined solution. You'll receive a clear-eyed report that leadership can use to advocate internally, allocate resources, and sequence AI investments wisely.
Ideal for: Institutions or systems beginning to explore AI strategy; leadership teams seeking data to inform board or cabinet conversations; organizations preparing for grant applications or strategic planning cycles.
Inquire about a Readiness Assessment -
Charting a path forward
Once you understand where you are, we help you build a roadmap that balances institutional priorities, stakeholder concerns, and practical constraints.
Our strategy development engagements include:
Stakeholder alignment sessions to build shared understanding across academic affairs, student services, IT, and faculty governance
Policy and governance framework development addressing responsible use, academic integrity, data privacy, and decision-making authority
Implementation roadmap with phased priorities, resource requirements, and success indicators
Change management planning to address initiative fatigue and build sustainable adoption
We co-design strategies with your team. Not for you, but with you. The institutions that succeed with AI are those whose people feel ownership over the direction.
Ideal for: Institutions with board or cabinet mandate to develop AI strategy; systems seeking consistency across campuses while allowing institutional flexibility; organizations that have completed a readiness assessment and are ready to act.
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Building capacity at every level
Sustainable AI adoption requires more than tools. It requires people who understand how to use them ethically, effectively, and in service of student success.
Our professional development offerings include:
AI literacy workshops for faculty, staff, and administrators
Role-specific training (advising, student services, academic affairs, institutional research)
Train-the-trainer programs to build internal capacity for ongoing learning
Prompt engineering for higher education with practical applications for your context
All sessions are grounded in T3's public goods research, including Attainment with AI: Making a Real Difference in College Completion with Artificial Intelligence, developed in partnership with Complete College America.
Ideal for: Institutions seeking to build broad AI literacy; teams preparing for specific tool implementations; professional development offices looking for facilitators who understand higher education.
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A thought partner as you navigate uncertainty
AI in higher education is evolving rapidly. Our advisory retainers provide ongoing strategic counsel as you encounter new challenges, vendor pitches, and emerging opportunities.
Advisory support may include:
Rapid-turnaround guidance on emerging issues
Vendor evaluation and procurement support
Preparation for board presentations or stakeholder convenings
Continuous improvement check-ins as implementation unfolds
Ideal for: Institutions in active implementation who want a knowledgeable thought partner; leadership teams navigating fast-moving decisions; systems coordinating AI efforts across multiple campuses.
Student Journey Mapping
Our Approach: See It Before You Fix It
Too often, institutions invest in new tools, programs, or initiatives without first understanding the experience they're trying to improve. The result is layered complexity, staff fatigue, and students who still can't navigate the path to completion.
T3's journey and process work is grounded in a simple principle: you have to see the current state clearly before you can design a better future state. We've traced student pathways that require seven logins, four offices, and three conflicting sets of instructions. We've heard students say "I just didn't know who to ask" about information that was technically available but practically invisible. This is the gap between policy and practice, between intention and experience, between what your catalog says and what your students live.
Our facilitation brings the right people into the room, surfaces what's actually happening, and builds shared ownership of what needs to change. We don't hand you a report and walk away. We help you see together, decide together, and move forward together.
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What does your institution feel like from the student's perspective?
Journey mapping reveals the gaps between institutional intent and student experience. We facilitate collaborative sessions that bring together stakeholders from across your institution to trace the student path through critical touchpoints.
Our journey mapping engagements cover:
Advising and academic planning (from first appointment through graduation)
Onboarding and enrollment (application through first semester)
Technology adoption and user experience (how students actually interact with your platforms)
Transfer pathways (for both incoming and outgoing transfer students)
Dual enrollment transitions (high school to college experience)
Financial aid and billing processes
Journey mapping sessions surface pain points, handoff failures, and moments of confusion that students experience but rarely report. The output is a visual map your team can use to prioritize improvements and build cross-functional ownership of the student experience.
Ideal for: Institutions launching student success initiatives; teams implementing new advising or case management models; leadership seeking to align departments around a shared understanding of the student experience.
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Where are the bottlenecks, workarounds, and broken handoffs?
Process mapping goes deeper than journey mapping to document how work actually flows (or doesn't) across departments, systems, and roles. We help you see where inefficiencies live, where staff are creating workarounds, and where students fall through the cracks.
Our process mapping engagements include:
Current-state documentation of how processes actually function today
Pain point identification through staff interviews and observation
Handoff analysis to find where information gets lost between departments
Technology utilization review to assess whether your tools are helping or creating friction
Future-state design with your team to streamline operations
Process mapping is particularly valuable when you're preparing for a technology implementation, onboarding a new platform, or trying to understand why an existing tool isn't being used effectively.
Ideal for: Institutions preparing for or recovering from technology implementations; teams experiencing high staff turnover or burnout; leadership seeking to reduce friction before adding new initiatives.
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What do prospective and current students actually experience?
Sometimes you need an outside perspective. T3’s founder has conducted secret shopping and 50+ community colleges, assessing what students encounter when they try to get information, enroll, or access services.
Our secret shopping engagements assess:
Website navigation and information clarity
Responsiveness to inquiries (email, phone, chat)
Enrollment and registration processes
Advising appointment access and quality
Campus wayfinding and service accessibility
You'll receive a detailed report with specific observations, comparisons to peer institutions, and prioritized recommendations. This is particularly valuable for institutions that want an honest external perspective on what's working and what's not.
Ideal for: Institutions concerned about enrollment yield; marketing and communications teams seeking candid feedback; leadership preparing for accreditation or strategic planning.
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Bringing the right people together to solve the right problems
Student success work often fails not because of bad ideas, but because the people who need to collaborate don't have structured time or space to do so. T3 facilitates cross-functional working sessions that bring together academic affairs, student services, IT, enrollment, and other stakeholders to tackle shared challenges.
Our facilitation services include:
Single-institution facilitation for strategic planning, initiative design, or problem-solving
Multi-institution convenings for systems, consortia, or grant-funded collaboratives
Framework implementation sessions (such as student success framework rollouts)
Post-assessment action planning to turn findings into concrete next steps
We've facilitated engagements that generated hundreds of stakeholder responses and translated them into actionable priorities. Our approach emphasizes co-design: we don't hand you a report and walk away. We help you build ownership and momentum.
Ideal for: Institutions with siloed departments struggling to coordinate; systems seeking to build shared practice across campuses; grant-funded initiatives requiring structured collaboration.
Research & Thought Leadership
Our Approach: Learning in Public
T3 Advisory contributes to the field, not just individual clients. Our applied research shapes how higher education leaders think about AI adoption, change management, initiative fatigue, and the practices that drive student success.
We talk to the people doing the work, including the voices not always heard in national conversations: front-line advisors, faculty juggling impossible workloads, staff at under-resourced institutions, and the community colleges that serve the majority of first-generation students. We ask the hard questions that we believe need to be addressed in this pivotal moment for our sector: What does it actually take to change practice at scale? Why do well-funded initiatives still fail? How do we adopt AI without burning out the people we're asking to implement it?
We believe practical guidance shouldn't be locked behind price tags. T3 creates resources that any institution can use, regardless of whether they hire us. Our consulting funds our research. Our research makes our consulting sharper. And both are oriented toward the same goal: helping institutions build the capacity to serve students well, sustainably.
We share what we're finding, even when it's messy. We create tools others can use. We believe the field gets stronger when knowledge flows freely.
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Asking the questions practitioners need answered
We conduct research designed to be useful, not just publishable. Our work focuses on what's actually happening at institutions, not what strategic plans say should be happening.
Recent and ongoing research includes:
AI adoption in higher education, including interviews with 40+ institutional leaders on readiness, barriers, and implementation realities
Initiative fatigue, examining why institutions struggle to sustain change and what leaders can do about it
Practice change as a leading indicator, exploring how to measure whether initiatives are actually shifting behavior before expecting outcome changes
We also partner with foundations, intermediaries, and national organizations on custom research projects that require deep institutional knowledge and credibility with practitioners.
Ideal for: Foundations commissioning field-facing research; national organizations seeking to understand what's really happening on the ground; systems or collaboratives wanting to learn across their institutions.
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Free resources for the field
Featured publications:
Attainment with AI: Making a Real Difference in College Completion with Artificial Intelligence — 170+ use cases and 30+ prompts for student success practitioners, developed in partnership with Complete College America
Prompt Engineering for Higher Education — A free template for getting better results from generative AI
AI and Equity in Higher Education — A brief on how institutions can adopt AI without amplifying existing inequities
AI for Institutional Transformation — A national landscape study on AI Adoption at primarily access-focused institutions.
We develop these resources because we've seen too many good ideas stay locked behind consulting fees or paywalls. If it can help an institution serve students better, we want it in their hands.
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Making sense of a fast-moving landscape
T3's founder, Dr. Audrey Ellis, speaks at conferences and convenings on AI in higher education, student success strategy, initiative fatigue, and change management.
We also offer facilitated sensemaking sessions for leadership teams trying to interpret what emerging trends, new research, or shifting policy landscapes mean for their specific context. These sessions are designed to help leaders cut through the noise and focus on what actually matters for their institutions.
Ideal for: Conferences seeking speakers on AI or student success; leadership teams wanting structured time to think through strategic implications; boards or cabinets preparing for major decisions.
Looking for something different?
Our best engagements start with a conversation, not a menu. If you're facing a challenge that doesn't fit neatly into the categories above, reach out. We co-design every engagement to fit your context.