Executive Functioning in College: Why Smart Students Can Still Struggle

One of the things I've seen repeatedly in my career is a student who is clearly capable of doing college-level work but has a surprisingly difficult time managing college.

They can understand complicated material. They can have a great conversation about something they read in class. They can write a terrific paper. And then they miss the deadline to turn it in.

For parents and professors, this can be incredibly frustrating. It can be frustrating for the student, too. We tend to explain these situations in terms of motivation. The student needs to try harder, be more responsible, stop procrastinating, or get organized.

Sometimes that's part of it. But often we're looking at two different sets of skills.

There are the skills required to understand and learn the material. Then there are the skills required to manage everything that has to happen around that learning.

That second group of skills relies heavily on executive functioning.

What do we mean by executive functioning?

Executive functioning is an umbrella term for the mental processes we use to regulate our attention and behavior in pursuit of a goal. Researchers commonly identify working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility as core executive functions, with more complex skills such as planning and problem solving building from them.

In college, though, I think it's often easier to understand executive functioning by looking at what students are actually being asked to do.

A student has five classes. Each professor has a different syllabus. Assignments are due at different times and may be posted in different places. There is a paper due three weeks from now, an exam next Tuesday, some reading for tomorrow, and a discussion post due at midnight. The student also has to eat, sleep, do laundry, get to appointments, maintain friendships, and hopefully have some kind of life outside of school.

Someone has to continually figure out what matters most, what can wait, how long things are going to take, when to start, and what to do when the original plan falls apart.

In high school, adults often provide a surprising amount of this structure. Teachers give reminders. Parents check grades. Classes meet frequently. Large projects may have intermediate deadlines. If a student starts getting off track, somebody is likely to notice.

Then we send students to college and remove a great deal of that structure almost overnight.

A professor might assign a paper in September that is due in November and barely mention it again. A student may finish class at noon and have the rest of the day technically "free." Of course, it isn't really free. There are six things that need to happen during that time, and now the student is responsible for deciding when and how they happen.

We sometimes describe this simply as independence. But independence places enormous demands on executive functioning.

The student who can do the work but doesn't get it done

This is probably the pattern I have encountered most often in my work with college students.

A student does very well on a difficult exam but forgets a small homework assignment. They produce an excellent ten-page paper after starting it the night before. They know they have something due but can't seem to begin it. They spend two hours doing something relatively unimportant while a major deadline gets closer.

From the outside, the inconsistency can be baffling. If you can write an A paper, why can't you remember to submit a discussion post? If you're smart enough to understand organic chemistry, why can't you keep track of your assignments?

But intelligence and executive functioning aren't the same thing.

This is one reason I think we need to be careful about interpreting these behaviors as laziness or a lack of caring. I've worked with many students who care enormously. In fact, they may be experiencing a tremendous amount of anxiety precisely because they know what they're supposed to be doing and can't seem to consistently make it happen.

The problem isn't always knowing what to do. Sometimes the problem is everything that has to happen between knowing and doing.

Research in higher education is beginning to pay more attention to this. A recent scoping review of executive-function research among undergraduate students found substantial interest in the relationship between executive functioning and academic achievement. In one study of 315 first-year higher-education students, executive functioning and self-regulated learning together accounted for 39.8% of the variation in credits earned within that sample.

That doesn't mean executive functioning explains 40% of college success, and I would be very cautious about making that claim. College outcomes are much more complicated than that. But the finding reinforces something many of us who work closely with college students have observed for years: being capable of learning college material and being able to independently manage college are related, but they are not the same thing.

What executive-functioning difficulty actually looks like

It doesn't always look dramatic.

It may be a student who looks at "write research paper" on a task list for six days because the task is too large to provide an obvious starting point.

It may be someone who keeps a calendar but rarely looks at it.

It may be a student who remembers the exam worth 30% of the grade but misses three small assignments because none of them felt urgent at the time.

Or the student who creates an ambitious schedule on Sunday night, gets derailed by one unexpected event on Monday, and effectively abandons the schedule for the rest of the week.

Sometimes students tell us exactly what is happening: "I know what I need to do. I just can't seem to do it."

I think we should take that statement more seriously.

Instead of immediately asking why the student isn't trying harder, we can ask what is happening between the intention and the action. Is the task too vague? Is the student overwhelmed by competing priorities? Do they have a realistic sense of how long the work will take? Are deadlines stored somewhere reliable? Do they know the first concrete step? Is there enough structure around them to support the level of independence we're expecting?

Those questions tend to lead to much more useful solutions.

This isn't just about ADHD

Executive-functioning difficulties are commonly associated with ADHD, and many college students with ADHD experience significant challenges with planning, organization, attention, time management, and task initiation.

But executive functioning isn't another word for ADHD.

Every student uses executive functions. A student doesn't need a diagnosis to have difficulty managing the organizational demands of college. Sleep, stress, competing demands, unfamiliar environments, and simply being asked to manage far more independently than before can all affect how successfully someone manages their work.

This matters because I don't think executive-function support should be something students have to qualify for.

We don't require a diagnosis before teaching a student how to write a better paper. We shouldn't need one before helping a student develop better systems for planning their week, breaking down a project, or figuring out what deserves their attention today.

Good support should lead toward independence

There is an important tension in executive-function support. If someone else is always telling a student what to do next, the student may get more things done, but we haven't necessarily helped them become more independent.

The goal should be to gradually move more of that process into systems the student can use themselves.

That means getting deadlines out of their head and into a reliable place. Turning "write paper" into a series of actual actions. Looking at a week before it becomes a crisis. Estimating how long work will take and then learning from how inaccurate that estimate was. Deciding what matters most rather than simply doing whatever feels easiest to start.

It also means learning how to recover.

Students sometimes think being organized means creating the perfect plan and following it. That's not really how life works. Plans get disrupted. Assignments take longer than expected. People get sick. Professors change deadlines.

Executive functioning isn't just the ability to make a plan. It's also the ability to notice that the plan isn't working and make another one.

We should also look at the environment

There is another side of this conversation that I don't think gets enough attention.

We have a tendency in education to locate the problem entirely within the student. The student has poor time management. The student is disorganized. The student needs better executive functioning.

Sometimes that's true. But sometimes we have also designed an environment that creates unnecessary executive demands.

If a student has to search through five different systems to determine what is due, that's partly an organizational challenge for the student, but it's also a design choice made by the institution.

If important instructions are buried in a long syllabus, deadlines change without being clearly communicated, or expectations remain implicit until a student gets something wrong, we shouldn't automatically treat every resulting difficulty as a deficit within the student.

I've spent much of my career watching students exceed expectations when we change the systems around them. That experience has made me much less interested in asking how we can make students fit imperfect systems and much more interested in asking how we can build better systems while also giving students tools to navigate the ones that already exist.

We need to do both.

Where technology and AI can help

This is also where I think technology has an interesting role to play, particularly now.

There are legitimate concerns about AI doing too much for students. If technology writes the paper, solves the problem, or replaces the intellectual work that was supposed to produce learning, we've made something easier without necessarily making education better.

But that isn't the only possible use of AI.

What if we use technology to support the work around the learning?

The student still has to read the article, understand the concept, solve the equation, develop the argument, and write the paper. But technology can help organize the syllabus, keep track of deadlines, break a large assignment into smaller steps, look at competing priorities, and help the student decide what makes sense to work on next.

That distinction is important to me.

It's also a large part of why we developed Tanglio.

Tanglio is an AI-powered executive-functioning platform built for college students. Students can upload a syllabus and turn it into an organized set of courses, assignments, and deadlines. They can plan their day, prioritize competing work, break down larger assignments, set goals, and get support when they aren't sure what to do next.

The idea isn't to have AI do college for students. It's to provide some of the structure around college that students are increasingly expected to create for themselves.

Tanglio is currently free for college students.

Sometimes an app isn't enough

Technology is one tool. It isn't a replacement for people.

Some students need academic coaching. Some benefit from disability or accessibility services, tutoring, counseling, faculty support, medical care, or a combination of these things. A student who is consistently struggling deserves more than another productivity app and the suggestion that they become better organized.

The level and type of support should match the student and the situation.

But I do think we can get much better at recognizing executive functioning as part of the college experience rather than waiting until a capable student is failing and then wondering what went wrong.

Rethinking what it means to be ready for college

For years, we've talked about college readiness primarily in academic terms. Can the student read at the required level? Can they write a college paper? Do they know the math? Can they understand the material?

Those things obviously matter.

But when a student arrives on campus, we suddenly ask them to do something much bigger. We ask them to manage the process of being a college student.

They have to manage several courses simultaneously, translate syllabi into weekly actions, start work without being prompted, prioritize competing demands, keep track of dozens of deadlines, recognize when they're getting behind, ask for help, and adjust when things don't go according to plan.

Then we're surprised when some very bright students struggle.

Maybe we shouldn't be.

Perhaps a better approach to college readiness is to think not only about whether students are capable of learning the material, but also about the structures, skills, and supports they'll need to manage the process of learning it.

In my experience, when we get that part right, students frequently show us they were capable of much more than the system initially gave them credit for.