Matriculate - check. But will they graduate?

Melvin Hines grew up in a small South Georgia town where only 68 of 250 of his high school peers graduated, and even fewer went to college. Attending the University of Georgia was a major milestone for him, but he felt like “a fish out of water” as one of the few Black students from a different, more rural region of the state. After facing challenges and feeling unsupported, Melvin made significant changes during his undergraduate education, going on to earn degrees in law and business. His experiences inspired him to pursue educational equality, leading him to found Upswing.

Laurie Koehler of Koehler Consulting, LLC and a former Chief Enrollment and Student Success Officer met with Melvin Hines, CEO and Co-Founder of Upswing, to chat about the focus on student success within the enrollment organization on campus, and learn more about how Upswing is helping colleges and universities with retention.

Laurie: Melvin, during my career within higher education, I had multiple opportunities to build student success teams within the enrollment unit, and I’m pleased to see that admissions and enrollment teams are focused more frequently on not just matriculation, but overall success of the student.  You have a personal undergraduate success story that inspired you to create Upswing - can you tell us about it?

Melvin: Coming from a small town in South Georgia, attending UGA was a big deal.  I succeeded in studying Economics, but I found I was suffering in silence.  It was hard to relate to most of the students there who were primarily from counties in North Georgia, and I found it hard to feel acclimated with no one to really reach out to.  I found my footing when I started volunteering with the Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization and it opened my eyes to the fact that while Athens was home to a flagship institution, it was also one of the poorest counties in the state, and most of the local high school students didn’t feel like it was an option for them to continue their education.  This really didn’t sit right with me.

Laurie: This thinking seems to have propelled your academic career.  After graduating you went on to study both Business and Law at Duke University.  What transpired during your graduate studies that led you down an entrepreneurial path?

Melvin: So while I was in the School of Law, I started the Duke Forum for Law and Social Change.  I invited a speaker from North Carolina Central University (an HBCU) and we connected, eventually leading me to take a teaching position for first years at NC Central for three years, focused on tools and strategies to help students persist.  While teaching, I went on to Business School at Duke, and started to aspire to create a technology platform to foster equity by connecting students and helping to acclimate them to their university environment.  I ended up pitching the idea to the CIO at NC Central at the time, and in 2013, Upswing was born.

Laurie: So tell us about Upswing then - how did you go from ideation to creation?

Melvin: We started working with two community colleges in rural North Carolina, pulling all their student resources together into one platform, making it easily available to students.  However, while students were using the platform, and we were gaining more users, we found that there were even more students who weren’t reaching out for help, and  would just withdraw or stop out..  So a few years later, we created an SMS-based virtual assistant, Ana, that engages with students in a way to encourage them to “raise their hand” for help, before they feel it’s too late to succeed. 

Laurie: So how does the ‘Ana’ feature contribute to student retention?

Melvin: Ana is an incredibly powerful tool for students.  We use SMS to send proactive messages to students in the form of reminders, questions, important resources, and even empathetic messages.  In the course of almost 12 years, we’ve gone from two institutions to over 60, resulting in almost 1 million students using the platform and Ana.  Most of our client institutions are heavily focused on marginalized student populations, and we have been able to save over 75,000 students from dropping out.

Laurie: 75,000?!  That’s incredible!  What does that look like in terms of retention rates within those institutions?

Melvin: We have found that on average, institutions that offer Upswing to their students typically see retention rates increase by 10% to 15%.  Every few years, we do studies to measure initial rates from IPEDs as compared to post-Upswing rates, and we work with some of our client institutions to do some individualized studies as well.  In fact, recently, North Carolina A&T shared a 7-year study with us that indicates Upswing helped reduce their undergraduate time to graduation by 4 months and graduate students by 7 months.

Laurie: Given the significant impact of Upswing and the extensive data your organization collects, what have been some of the most enlightening insights for you, your team, and your client institutions?

Melvin: We use the data insights we glean to continue to develop Upswing’s features. For example, sadly, on average nine students per academic year interact with Ana who are contemplating self harm.  Given our learnings from students connecting with Ana this way, mental health became a priority on our product roadmap.  We decided to partner with a third-party mental health provider to build a mental health module for our institutions, where we can offer proactive therapy and support.  In cases of emergency, we can connect students immediately with the appropriate help.

Also, in addition to retention rates increasing, we’ve seen graduation rates increase by up to 16% in some of our client institutions.  And we gain more and more insight on student needs every year, which we publish in our annual Ana Insights report. 

Laurie: Melvin, you and the Upswing team are really doing great work for students.  What are some future plans for Upswing?

Melvin: Thank you Laurie.  We are continuing to grow, and we are keeping our focus on the fastest growing population in higher education: non-traditional learners.  We want to continue to help marginalized students, and most of our growth is centered around community college systems.  While Upswing is nice to have for all students, we know that non-traditional students need Upswing most as they cannot always get to campus in time to partake in alternate support services.  So, we are working with institutional clients to grow awareness and outreach to those students who need to have access to our resources and support, focusing on marginalized populations, student athletes, adult learners and veterans. And some schools are using just one or two modules of Upswing based on the specific needs of those targeted populations. 

Laurie: Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us Melvin.  I’m looking forward to watching Upswing continue to impact student success. One of the drums I beat loudly while I was working at four-year institutions was that chief enrollment officers must shift institutional thinking about enrollment management away from a singular focus on new student recruitment. Instead, schools need to embrace enrollment management as inclusive of student retention and graduation efforts as well, which are both good for students AND the institution. Are you finding that more enrollment leaders at four-year institutions are involved in bringing Upswing to their campuses?

Melvin: Absolutely, we are working with the University of Memphis, Texas Southern University and the online program at Indiana University, as well as others.  About half of our clients are HBCUs and HSIs.  And thank you Laurie, while traditionally we’ve worked with Student Success Officers who might be outside the enrollment management structure, as well as IT Leadership, I appreciate this discussion in helping us stress the importance of overall student success in front of enrollment teams.  We want everyone to succeed - from matriculation through graduation and beyond!  In order to make an Upswing implementation on campus successful, we need several departments to come together - a minimum of enrollment, student affairs, and IT are needed.  We know that more schools want to build out student success infrastructures on their campuses, but making that shift takes lots of buy-in, commitment, dollars, and not everyone can do that successfully.  In the interim, Upswing is here and can help facilitate that shift. We can be a low investment, high impact way to prove out this model can work for your students and encourage the campus community to embrace longer-term investments in student success efforts.

Contact Harbinger Lane Consulting (info@harbingerlane.com) to learn more about how our partners help Admissions and Enrollment teams with matriculation and completion.

Image: iStock.com/Evgeniia Ardashnikova