How UTPB transformed degree planning and advising in under a year

The University of Texas Permian Basin (UTPB) is a campus built on opportunity. Located in the heart of western Texas, UTPB serves a diverse student body that includes traditional students, online students, as well as many non-traditional learners who often juggle work and family caregiving alongside their academics. Whether on campus or remote, many students arrive with prior credits and without the resources or network that make navigating college easy. UTPB has long embraced its role as a “campus of completers,” committed to helping students stay on track and earn the credentials they need to reach their goals.

To support its mission of increasing degree completion and workforce readiness, UTPB sought to create a clearer, more empowering path for students to graduate, especially for those navigating complex academic journeys or studying remotely.

That vision has become reality through Stellic, which translated key aspects of UTPB’s Strategic Plan into a unified, student-first platform. It's offered students and staff a shared space to plan degrees, track progress, and make confident academic decisions, no matter where they’re logging in from.

Historically, UTPB students often relied on paper documents and inconsistent advising experiences. For fully online students—many of whom never set foot on campus—this lack of clarity made it even harder to feel connected or confident in their degree progress. For many, it felt like navigating a maze: varying degree audits across departments, unclear pathways, and missed opportunities due to transfer credit confusion. Students were constantly doing what some affectionately called the “Falcon Shuffle”, asking multiple staff members the same questions to piece together their path.

BACKGROUND

"Over several years, we began surveying students to better understand their experience and identify what needed to improve. We found students didn’t always trust the information they received. They'd ask different people the same question and get different answers. We needed to fix that."

With a strong foundation in student experience and vision focused on completion, UTPB prioritized a new approach to academic planning, one that could serve the needs of online and remote learners just as well as students on campus. They chose Stellic for an intuitive, student-first experience that could adapt and improve campus functions, and above all else, connect degree progress tracking with planning and advising so students always understand where they stand and what comes next.

Unlike implementations that require large, dedicated teams, UTPB launched Stellic in just 11 months—with no full-time project staff. The core team included advisors, IT staff, registrar and graduate studies leaders, each juggling existing responsibilities while moving the project forward.

THE CONTEXT

"We didn’t have a dedicated implementation or project management team. We were all building this while advising students, managing registration, and supporting other priorities."

To make it happen, they established a consistent meeting cadence, set clear milestones, and maintained open lines of communication across departments. When challenges arose—like finding programs with no formal documentation—they treated them as opportunities to align expectations and create consistency for the future.
They also front-loaded the technical integration. Stellic's Partner Success team visited campus early in the process to work directly with UTPB’s IT team, which created early momentum and helped resolve systems questions more quickly.

Rather than confusion or frustration when the platform first launched, the response from students was quiet confidence and intuitive understanding.

To date, students have made over 20,000 planning decisions from the platform, and over 30% have engaged with the platform at least 3 times.

“I saw students in person who couldn’t wait to show me their plans,” said Becky. “They were excited."

One student even shared that seeing their progress laid out gave them, for maybe the first time, a real sense of momentum toward graduation.

“You can tell students are excited. They’re more vocal about the tools that work for them, and Stellic has definitely been one of them.”

Advising at UTPB has historically been hands-on. Advisors register students themselves in 45-minute sessions, often spending time on clerical tasks rather than guidance. With Stellic, those sessions are changing.

This past term, many students came into advising sessions with plans already mapped out. They had used the platform to explore courses, draft schedules, and clarify their goals. Advisors, in turn, spent more of that time advising—having deeper conversations about course choices, career trajectories, and academic support.

Live registration, the next phase of the rollout, will let students register directly from their plans—further increasing autonomy while maintaining guardrails for accuracy and support.

During peak registration periods, advisors spend up to 30–35 hours a week meeting with students. Shortening sessions to 20 minutes would free up nearly 19 hours each week—time that could be reinvested into supporting more students or providing deeper guidance to those who need it most.

In giving a trusted and visual path to completion, Stellic reinforces confidence and momentum for students at UTPB. For first-generation students and those without a big support system to help navigate higher ed, the platform’s clarity is empowering.

"The platform’s progress bars and planning tools give students that small but powerful sense of 'I can do this,'" said Becky. "They can see how far they’ve come and what’s next. That matters."

And crucially, that transformation didn’t require a massive investment of time or resources.

With live registration on the horizon, UTPB is poised to save even more time and improve student agency. And as the advising team expands its use of Stellic, the university is reinforcing its commitment to being a place where students finish what they started.