To succeed in today’s higher education landscape, institutions must stop viewing communication as transactional and start seeing it as transformational. Building trust from the very first interaction and continuing to nurture it through contextual, human-centered outreach is the key to creating lifelong learners who feel seen, supported, and motivated to persist.

On this episode, Suze Guillaume, Director of Advisement and Career Services at Miami Dade College, discusses the impact of early trust-building during orientation and the importance of humanizing communication to improve long-term student engagement.