When Institutions Become a Burden: Embedded Institutional Process Mapping as a Framework for Understanding Student Success

The transition into higher education is one of the most consequential junctures in a young person’s trajectory. Institutional retention is an institutional responsibility. When students leave before completing their degree, the default response has been to look at the student, their preparation, their motivation, their fit. This paper starts from a different premise: the cracks students fall through are structural. They form where offices operate in isolation, where handoffs go unowned, and where no unit is responsible for the space between them. Those cracks are most costly for students who were never given the social or political capital to navigate institutional complexity on their own: first-generation, Pell-eligible, and racially minoritized students, students with disabilities, LGBTQI-identified students, and others for whom the institution was not designed. This article introduces Embedded Institutional Process Mapping (EIPM), a framework adapted from business process mapping traditions and applied to higher education to help institutions map what their offices do and synchronize those efforts toward a shared institutional purpose. Drawing on loose coupling theory, administrative burden scholarship, and QuantCrit, EIPM surfaces where coordination fails and identifies which students bear the cost of that failure. A proof-of-concept application at a regional open-access institution, where 67% of students are first-generation, 58% are Pell-eligible, and 83% work while enrolled, demonstrates how EIPM makes structural misalignments visible that conventional program assessment routinely overlooks. In its widest application, EIPM operationalizes what equity work requires: disaggregated institutional data examined through a critical lens, to name who is being underserved and trace that outcome back to the institutional processes that produced it.