Opening the gates to a college degree

How Upswing’s recent funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will result in 50,000 retained college students by 2020

Today, in the United States, less than half of all students that enter college end up with a college degree. Think about that for a second — this means that it is actually more likely that you won’t end up with a degree than with one if you’re pursuing a college education.

For the past five years, Upswing has focused on finding out why students don’t graduate and what can be done to improve retention. This journey has led us down a pathway to understand how to increase college accessibility and affordability for students of all types. With promising initial results (students with access to Upswing are 10% more likely to stay in college), we’ve been selected as a grant recipient from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to expand the scope and depth of our impact. Their tagline, “We are impatient optimists working to reduce inequity”, is one that resonates closely with everyone at Upswing, as we focus every day on finding out how to reduce the equality gap among college students around the world.

Our funding will allow us to focus on answering two critical questions: why are so many students failing to graduate and what can we do to help?

Receiving an education is only one part of the average student’s life, so college should be built around the student’s lifestyle

The traditional picture of a college student — late teens to early twenties, living on campus, full-time — no longer represents a majority of students attending college in the United States. Sometimes referred to as “non-traditional”, these students often have full-time jobs, are older, taking online classes, and have children of their own.

We plan on expanding the ways in which colleges engage and support all students. Through our Ana program, all students are provided with a virtual assistant from the minute they enroll in college all the way up through graduation. Our initial findings have indicated that students are 5 to 10 times more likely to engage with Ana than they are to interact with traditional email outreach.

Access to college is easier than ever before, so support methods must adapt to new means of college access

Today, more than half of all students in college take at least one online class, a staggering fact when you consider that the first modern online class didn’t exist until the mid 1990’s. This has proven to be a challenging paradigm shift for colleges, since much of the infrastructure and resources long-established on campus were originally designed for students physically present.

Because of this, we’re helping colleges solve the problem of how to engage students with the resources that a college already offers. This means providing students with access to services while keeping college costs and process changes to a minimum. To date, this has included implementing online methods of accessing student services like advising, tutoring, and writing support through smart recommendations from Ana.

More people and resources are needed to solve this problem

We’ve also received support from some other world-class organizations like Lumina Foundation, Rethink Education, and the United Way. However, it still isn’t enough — more people need to dedicate time and energy into figuring out what can be done to improve our higher education system.

By 2020, Upswing will be the direct reason why 50,000 additional students have stayed in college — internally, we call this our “Upswing 2020 Vision” and it drives all of us to focus on a common objective. To get there, we must continue to understand the reasons why students don’t stay in college and provide them with an option that’s better than dropping out.

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If you’re interested in learning more about Upswing and our mission, please get in touch with us!