Analysis

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Student Life

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"We have expertise that universities don't have….

all of our coaching is remote, but it's all driven by data.

ReUp Founding CEO, Nitzan Pelman

Market Overview

The academic success coaching industry has been growing rapidly over the past two decades. Adapted from talent scouting, work-life balance coaching, and executive mentoring trends in business the role of the coach in higher education has assumed significant prominence in student success modeling. Commercialized academic success coaching first entered the world of higher education in 2000 when a private company, InsideTrack, offered services to colleges and universities seeking to improve their student retention rates (Bettinger & Baker, 2014). Today, the vast majority of higher education institutions in North America have either created their own in-house academic coaching services or partnered with private consulting firms to incorporate student success programming.

Market Breakdown - Customers

ReUp targets accredited colleges and universities that have both excess capacity and a desire to boost completion rates through re-enrollment - especially those institutions that have been unable to establish successful in-house programing. They have identified a relatively untapped need to help stopped-out learners navigate the often intimidating process of applying for readmission. Nitzan Pelman's whitepaper on the Forgotten Students summarizes the problem best (Pelman, N. & Watson, G., 2018):

"Each year, over a million students drop out of college or university—some 31 million Americans in the last two decades. To put this in perspective, colleges grant approximately 2.2 million degrees per year 1 —31 million dropouts is akin to not graduating any students for 14 full years. In fact, only 48.3% of first-time, full-time students at public universities graduate within six years, prompting academic leaders, like Arizona State University President Michael Crow, to dub this a “completion crisis.”

Market Breakdown - Competitors

No other company focuses exclusively on providing re-entry services, which makes ReUp the main option for higher education institutions in the US looking to reenroll stopout learners. Companies such as InsideTrack and Synergis Education provide more comprehensive coaching solutions designed to improve student enrollment and retention but their services appear to be packaged with retention and marketing services.

Unique Offering

The founders of ReUp Education saw the market-gap for this innovative business in the data surrounding national college completion relates. They identified that from a university’s perspective, re-enrolling stopped-out students is often seen as generating lower returns on investment than new enrollments and retention programing. Readmitted students are traditionally seen as a higher risk of not graduating and often require more time and resources to succeed. There is also a perceived conflict of interest for universities and colleges that proactively coach stopped-out students who might never be readmitted.

ReUp's unique offering lies in its approach and innovative use of technology. Once partner universities hand over their list of stopped out students, their work is basically done. Using a mix of machine learning, predictive analytics and human coaches, ReUp's "enagement engine" technology can pinpoint stop-outs who are the most likely to return, and then coaches engage the students by introducing the reentry process. Since its inception ReUp has kept the same funding model, incurring all upfront costs in the partnership, then taking a share of tuition revenue for each student re-enroll.

Technological Advantage

According to their website ReUp has stored extensive data on hundreds of thousands of students from its partner universities, including transcripts of advising interactions. To help extend the reach and effectiveness of its success coaches, ReUp has aggressively developed its predictive analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities. These capabilities play an integral part in helping ReUp find the students who they can best help succeed.

Predicting success

ReUp reports its predictive analytics can forecast key outcomes from recorded student behaviors. This allows coaches to focus their energies on students that are poised to make the most gains at that particular moment.

From empowerment
to action

Through a blend of automated outreach and coach-driven support, students receive timely interventions that are tailored to their needs across multiple channels of communication.

Forecast

In light of the pandemic, the imminent challenges emerging for higher education are also bringing about a convergence of forces that will impact the student success coaching market significantly. With 36 million learners in the US with 'some college but no degree' and 22 million Americans unemployed, demand for re-enrollment coaching services is likely to grow. There is also the disproportionate risk of current students deciding to stopout for a year or more - at least until universities can make a meaningful transition to a blended teaching model. The pandemic has been a catalyst forcing higher education intuitions to reexamine their base - student enrolment. For many institutions to survive, they will have to pivot to entirely new strategies to salvage enrollment numbers. Tapping into the stopout student market will likely be one of many strategizes explored.

The potential upmarket value of this new category of service is an open question. ReUp could use its data and technology to address the rest of the student life cycle. As ReUp refines its technology and methods, becoming increasingly profitable at the perceived low-ROI portion of the market, it could potentially progress toward providing coaching and retention services for all students at every stage of their journey, and more effectively than existing inhouse retention initiatives.

Recent Series A investments in ReUp have allowed the company to initiate two evolutions in their offerings. They have expanded forward to the natural extension of helping individual students outside their partner institutions. They now have the flexibility to:

1) Support any student who has stopped out across the nation and;

2) Support any student make a transition from a partner institution to new college or university

One grey area in ReUp's business model is how the organization actually uses the data it collects on stopout students to create predictive modelling for thousands of students. It is also unclear how ReUp secures sensitive data from intuitions and how it navigates federal and state privacy regulations. Information on its systems is limited to current financial backers and partner institutions. One can speculate that privacy regulations will be a major hurdle preventing any expansion beyond US borders.