For many college students, staying enrolled is not just about keeping up academically. It can also depend on whether they have enough food, stable housing, reliable transportation, financial support, and help navigating the systems around them.
That is why TimelyCare is expanding its Basic Needs service, giving colleges and universities more flexible ways to support students whose unmet needs may be affecting their wellbeing, academic progress, and ability to stay in school.
The expanded service introduces two offerings: Basic Needs Navigate and Basic Needs Connect. Both are designed to help institutions provide more coordinated support, improve follow-through after referrals, and reach more students without adding more work to already stretched campus teams.
The need is significant. According to the Hope Center Student Basic Needs Survey Report, 79% of college students who stopped attending, or considered dropping out, cited basic needs insecurity as a reason. The report also found that 59% of students experienced at least one form of basic needs insecurity.
Many campuses already have resources in place, including food pantries, emergency aid, and community partnerships. But having resources available does not always mean students can easily access them. Students may not know where to start, may face complicated processes, or may lose momentum after receiving a referral. For campus teams, it can also be difficult to keep track of student needs, coordinate support across departments, and follow up consistently when demand continues to grow.
TimelyCare’s expanded Basic Needs service is designed to help close those gaps. Rather than replacing the people, systems, or programs a campus already has, the service helps make support easier to organize, navigate, and deliver. It gives institutions a way to strengthen what they are already doing while helping students move more smoothly from need to support.
Basic Needs Navigate is the more comprehensive option. It is built for institutions that want deeper support for students with more complex or ongoing needs. Navigate helps students through multiple steps and touchpoints, reducing the chances that they fall off after a referral and improving coordination across teams, systems, and services.
Basic Needs Connect offers a more structured starting point for campuses that want to improve intake, visibility, and consistency but may not be ready for a more comprehensive model. Through centralized intake, structured follow-up, and connection to curated resources that are continuously maintained and updated, Connect helps bring more order to fragmented basic-needs processes.
“Colleges and universities need more than referral models to meet the level of student need they’re seeing today,” said Luke Hejl, CEO and Co-Founder of TimelyCare. “By expanding our Basic Needs service line, we’re giving institutions a more scalable way to help students move from need to support with stronger follow-through, better coordination, and a clearer connection to retention and student success.”
The expansion reflects a broader reality for higher education: basic needs are closely tied to mental health, academic performance, and persistence. When students are worried about where they will sleep, how they will afford groceries, or whether they can get to class, those challenges do not stay separate from their academic lives.
By building Basic Needs into its broader whole-student wellbeing platform, TimelyCare is helping institutions connect this work more directly to student wellbeing and retention goals. The approach is meant to create a more connected experience for students, especially those dealing with more than one challenge at a time.
