Is Today's University Ready for Generation Alpha? Fragmented Systems and a Digital Experience From Another Era.

October in Spain: enrollment is closed, classrooms are filling up again, and a fresh batch of students is starting their university life.

Among them is a generation that doesn't remember a world without a smartphone: they order dinner from an app, watch the series a platform recommends before they've even searched for it, and have never set foot in a bank branch.

For them, a service that works on its own, remembers who they are, and doesn't make them repeat the same process three times isn't a luxury, it's the baseline.

The competition is no longer the university next door, it's platforms like Amazon or Netflix

For years, a university was compared, experience-wise, with other universities. That comparison is over. Today, students measure their university by the same yardstick they use for Netflix, Amazon, or their banking app: services that know them, anticipate what they need, and solve things without friction.

It's an unfair comparison (nobody expects a university to run like a streaming company), but it's the one students make, and the one that counts. And when the digital experience doesn't measure up, students conclude the university doesn't work. Sometimes they say so where it hurts most: in the satisfaction survey, or in a chat with the friend who's deciding where to enroll next year.

That's why digital experience has stopped being an internal systems matter and become a matter of attracting and retaining students.

Four systems for a single process

Let's follow the student. To check a grade, pay a fee, or request a certificate, they go from the academic management system to the virtual classroom, from there to the e-government portal, and sometimes to the CRM that wrote to them back when they were still a prospect.

Each with its own address, its own look, and its own login. Each asking them who they are, as if they hadn't just told the previous one. Nobody designed it this way — each system was bought at the time to solve a specific problem, and it does solve it.

What wasn't designed was how they would talk to each other. And the one who ends up acting as the link between them all is the student.

From the inside, however, it doesn't always look that way. Three out of four universities consider their level of digital transformation adequate and on par with other sectors (Fundación CYD, 2023).

And it's not for lack of effort: a lot has been invested, but mostly in what's visible (connectivity, equipped classrooms, screens...). As the Higher Education Spaces 2025 report sums it up, infrastructure has advanced, but the model hasn't been rethought.

Why a new app won't fix this

When the experience fails, the natural response is a better app. It makes sense: the app is what people see and what takes the complaints. But the app is just the experience layer, and it can't stand on its own.

If underneath, the academic system, the virtual classroom, the CRM, and the e-government portal don't share data or identity, the new app gathers them on one screen without truly joining them: often, each service shows up as another system's window embedded inside the app.

Students notice right away: the look changes, but they still have to identify themselves again, still can't find their things in the same place, and still get bounced out to another system halfway through a process.

You can redesign the screen as many times as you like, but if the process still runs through four systems that don't know each other, the experience will stay broken. It's the difference between repainting the facade and fixing the wiring behind the wall.

Five signs the problem isn't on the screen

These five signs aren't about architecture or technology: they're about what happens in a normal school year. If you recognize several, the problem isn't on the surface:

1. Students type the same piece of data more than once during the year, in different systems, because some don't know what others have already stored.
2. A routine process forces them to leave the app and log into somewhere else, with a different login, just to finish it.
3. Changing anything on the platform depends on a third party: on their timelines, their priorities, and their budget, not yours.
4. Nobody has the full picture of a student on a single screen: admissions, the registrar's office, and the teaching staff each see different pieces of the same person.
5. The last digital improvement was an app or a redesign, not a change in how the systems connect underneath.

None of these signs, on its own, is serious. The problem is when they pile up, because then they stop being isolated incidents and become the same symptom repeating: the gap between what a student takes for granted and what they actually find.

The urgency isn't about who's arriving today

So when they arrive at university, they want to check their schedule, apply for a scholarship, book a study room… and for the process to be simple, fast, and effective.

Those born from 2013 onward (so-called Generation Alpha) will start arriving at university around 2031. For Gen Z, a fragmented experience is a letdown; for Alpha, who won't have known anything else, it will be a flaw.

Five years may seem like a long time. It isn't for this decision: an academic platform isn't swapped out every two years. It's chosen, implemented, and carried for a decade.

The ecosystem decision a university makes this year is the one that will greet those students. Today the question isn't how to serve the student who's in the classroom right now: it's how to serve the one who's still in primary school.