With a test coming up in his toughest subject, economics, Keaton Knight was verging on panic. The Indiana State University student considered himself a lousy test-taker in the best of circumstances, so it was time for a strategy session with his academic coach—who lives in Nashville.
At their appointed time, Jason Broyles, whose employer, a coaching company called InsideTrack, has a contract with Indiana State, called Mr. Knight. He advised the student to breathe deeply, not linger too long over tough questions, and read the prompts slowly and thoroughly. They discussed Mr. Knight’s approach of carving out study time in the library to avoid distractions and scheduling his job, in a hardware store, so it didn’t interfere with classes. After a rough start during the last academic year, Mr. Knight’s grades improved, and he passed the course.
“My relationship with Jason was awesome,” Mr. Knight, now a 20-year-old sophomore, says of his twice-monthly sessions. “Lots of times, I would have been lost without him.”
The growing number of colleges that hire private coaching companies, or provide coaching on their own, are counting on such personal relationships to improve retention and completion rates. The push for measurable results is intensifying around the country as some state lawmakers tie part of their college allocations to completion rates and foundations pour more money into finding solutions to the nation’s dropout crisis.
When coaching is done in-house, it’s often based in student-success centers, which are also growing in number, says Mary Stuart Hunter, executive director of the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. Coaches and advisers, at colleges that have both, assume complementary roles.
“Academic advising tends to focus on curricular issues—what students need to progress toward a career in a particular major,” says Ms. Hunter, whose center is based at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. “Coaching includes skills like understanding how to communicate with a professor or how to manage your time or study effectively.”
Ideally, academic counselors are covering some of the same bases. But instead of working with 300 students, a coach might have 80, allowing more time to get to know students personally.
The dominant player in the academic-coaching industry, which also includes groups like LifeBound and individual tutoring services like Tutor.com, InsideTrack began in San Francisco in 2001. Since then, it has worked with more than 800,000 students on around 100 campuses, according to company officials. “In the last three to four years, we have moved from operating with a headwind to operating with a tailwind,” says Dave Jarrat, the company’s vice president for marketing. “The big difference is the shift in focus in higher education from exclusively looking at access to looking at access and success.”
The service has about 300 coaches, all college graduates (half have advanced degrees), who work remotely or in a handful of coaching centers around the country. Each coach, who is typically responsible for at least 80 students, tailors his or her approach to the needs and preferences of the students. Traditional-age college students don’t like to be pinged in the morning, while working adults are most reachable early in the morning or after work. Younger students may not respond to emails or voice messages.
For the coaches, the workday is a carefully choreographed schedule of phone conversations, tweets, Facebook messages, and the occasional in-person meeting with as many as 175 students, Mr. Broyles’s current roster. He’s based at a coaching center in Tennessee; all of his students are at Indiana State, where he visits them once in the fall and once in the spring.
In a typical day, Mr. Broyles might have 10 meetings over the phone, lasting around 15 minutes each, on topics that might include family issues, financial stress, and homesickness. “If I remember that someone had a test that day, I might send a text saying, ‘Hey, hope things go well,’” he says. Coaches report back on trends they’re discovering, like if there are glitches in the registration process or the financial-aid system that are derailing students.
“First-generation students rarely have anyone in their support network who knows what the college experience is like,” says Mr. Jarrat. “They often come in with doubts about whether they’re college material.”
The coach might start out congratulating the student on her acceptance, telling her that college will be hard, that she’ll struggle and think she’s going to fail, and that that’s normal. The students who persevere, the coach will say, are the ones who will succeed.
Veterans arrive with their own challenges, says Mr. Jarrat, like learning to move from an environment of “top-down authority” to one in which they must challenge their professors’ assumptions and advocate for themselves. And they may underestimate how their military experiences translate to the civilian sphere—not realizing, for example, how having managed logistics for a remote base in a war zone could impress a corporate recruiter.
Coaching a high-achiever at Columbia or Harvard, two Ivy League universities that have contracts with InsideTrack, requires a different approach. “It’s not going to be about how you’re going to study for that test, but what options are there available to expand your horizons, which professors should you start networking with, and should you go abroad,” Mr. Jarrat says.
For some students, including Mr. Knight of Indiana State, the benefits of having a coach aren’t immediately obvious. “When I first got the phone call, I was pretty iffy about whether I should go through with it,” he says. He found, to his surprise, that he looked forward to his calls every other Thursday, when his coach would walk him through problems he was having juggling his assignments. “I knew there would be a lot of work, but the amount of papers we had to write was mind-blowing,” Mr. Knight recalls.
His coach, Mr. Broyles, remembered what it was like to be a struggling freshman. A 29-year-old with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, a master’s in theological studies, and a background in teaching English overseas, he recalls that he was drifting through his first year at Southern Nazarene University when a professor invited him out for coffee. “I was like, ‘Really?’ He ended up being one of my biggest supporters, helping me get into study abroad and take advantage of all of the opportunities I had,” says Mr. Broyles.
Sometimes, students need that kind of prodding. For instance, a recent study by the Center for Community College Student Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin found that relatively few students take advantage of strategies that are most likely to help them succeed. Tutoring times may be inconvenient, or students may worry about the stigma of showing up in a tutoring center. Meeting students where and when it’s most convenient, and extending coaching to all students, not just those who are struggling, draw more participants, says Mr. Jarrat.
On some campuses, the company offers coaching to half the freshman class so it can compare outcomes with and without the extra help. Based on a data analysis of how students respond, strategies are personalized for, say, low-income and first-generation students, or for those in health care or business majors.
But does coaching work? Officials at InsideTrack and Indiana State studied its effectiveness on retention rates for a segment of last year’s freshman class. Half of the 2,000 freshmen received coaching, half didn’t. After a year, it appeared that students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, along with those in the humanities, benefited from the coaching. On the other hand, there was no noticeable change in retention rates for students in the social sciences. Officials are not sure why the responses differed, but plan to investigate when more data are available.
While students sometimes sign up as individuals, most contracts are with colleges that typically pay anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few million dollars per year. That can be a steep price at a time of constrained budgets, but company officials say coaching pays for itself in higher retention rates. But while InsideTrack officials say business is booming, Charlie L. Nutt, executive director of the National Academic Advising Association, says he’s seen a shift toward coaching in-house.
“About six years ago, a lot of colleges were hiring groups like InsideTrack,” he says, but when the economy tanked many started developing their own coaching programs.
Florida State University is among those that began with a partnership with InsideTrack and later started its own in-house coaching program, which operates alongside its more traditional academic-advising system.
“We want to empower our students to be proactive and fully engaged in their education,” says Kathleen S. Smith, associate director of the combined university program, called Advising First. “They should understand the requirements for their major and have given thought to internships. That way, they come into an advising session with specific questions.”
She says the university has seen retention increases of about 5 percent among students who receive coaching during their freshman year. Having a coach who stays with them throughout the year is a plus, she says. “Students want someone who knows their story.”
Libby Sander contributed to this article.
