August 1, 2026. Op-Ed by Makola M. Abdullah, President, Virginia State University.
Every parent who has sent a child off to college knows the anxiety of that first semester. Will they find their footing? Will they ask for help when they need it? Will the institution meet them where they are? For many families, those questions are answered by a network of support: older siblings who attended college, parents who know how to read a financial aid letter. These mentors can decode an advising appointment. But for the students I serve at Virginia State University, that network often does not exist. Many are the first in their families to walk through a college door. They are navigating an unfamiliar world largely on their own. And for years, the digital systems higher education built to help them were, quietly and unintentionally, making that harder.
That had to change.
At VSU, nearly 70% of our students receive Pell Grants, making us the Virginia four-year public institution with the highest percentage of Pell-eligible students, according to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV). We have worked intentionally to keep tuition among the lowest in the state, and students who receive financial aid pay the lowest average net price among Virginia’s public four-year institutions, according to SCHEV data. Our mission is straightforward: to provide accessible, affordable pathways to economic mobility for students who need them most.
What stood in the way of that mission was not a lack of will. It was friction.
Students were moving between one platform for financial aid, another for class schedules, and another for advising appointments. Some information, like the cafeteria menu, was hard to find at all. Every additional login was a potential point of failure. Every disconnected system was one more place where a first-generation student — without a parent or older sibling to help them navigate — could get lost, fall behind, or quietly disengage. Research shows that students are already overwhelmed by the volume of emails, alerts, and messages that institutions send them. We were adding noise when our students needed clarity.
I watched this dynamic closely, and I decided we had to rethink it.
What I did not want to do was add yet another app to the pile. VSU, like many historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), operates with fewer resources than many of its peers. That constraint does not diminish our ambition; it sharpens it. It forces us to ask not just what we could build or buy, but what our students need and what is the most direct path to giving it to them.
The answer, I believed, was a single, mobile-friendly dashboard, one that brought key information together in one place, required only one login, and was built on infrastructure we already had rather than technology we would have to purchase and maintain from scratch.
I partnered with the nonprofit Ed Advancement through the HBCU Transformation Project and with support from Axim Collaborative. Together — and crucially, with VSU students and faculty as co-designers — we built the Front Porch Portal.