T here’s nothing in Mark David Milliron’s background that might have suggested that he would earn a Ph.D., let alone co-found one of the nation’s fastest-growing education-technology companies, Civitas Learning.
A first-generation college student who overcame “post-traumatic jock syndrome” with the help of a caring community-college professor, he is using his position as his company’s chief learning officer to help students with far more serious struggles succeed.
Civitas Learning offers colleges a cloud-based platform where mounds of data can be analyzed to improve learning and retention. The company also provides apps for administrators, faculty members, advisers, and students.
Professors and advisers learn which strategies work best with at-risk students, like avoiding certain combinations of killer courses in the same semester or receiving an encouraging nudge a few weeks into the semester. Students can use scheduling and mapping tools to choose courses and make other decisions that will keep them on track to graduate.
The problem isn’t that colleges don’t have enough data, says Mr. Milliron, 48. They’re swimming in it. But too often “the data points to troubling problems, and they get into analysis paralysis and don’t know what to do.”
What’s more, he says, colleges are “trying to help students next semester with data that’s two years old. It’s like driving with an outdated GPS.”
Mr. Milliron (pronounced Mill-EYE-ron) distinguishes between what he calls accountability analytics — the numbers gathered to satisfy trustees or lawmakers — and action analytics, which give students, faculty members, and counselors specific tools to help students succeed. “I’ve seen the power and possibilities of data in the last 20 years, and I’ve tried to tackle it from different seats,” he says.
Beginning in 2009, Mr. Milliron spent two years as deputy director for postsecondary improvement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, helping dole out money for data-analytics projects. He then teamed up with Charles Thornburgh, an in-house entrepreneur with Kaplan Education, to found Civitas Learning in 2011.
He immediately plunged into another Austin-based entrepreneurial venture as founding chancellor of Western Governors University-Texas, a self-paced, online university, private and nonprofit, that was established by the State of Texas in partnership with Western Governors University.
In 2013, after Civitas Learning had completed a successful test run with a handful of colleges and received an infusion of investor financing, Mr. Milliron rejoined the company full time. Now it is working with 880 campuses, serving 3.2 million students.
Mark listens well to people, then he takes what he sees, turns it 25 degrees, and creates something new.
Students at Austin Community College use the company’s Degree Map to see the classes, time, and money needed to finish their degrees or certificates. The app even inspired a slow jam by the college’s chancellor, Richard Rhodes.
Arizona State University uses another app acquired by Civitas, called College Scheduler, which plans a student’s class sections around outside time commitments.
Among the challenges Civitas faces are privacy concerns that make people skittish about sharing data. Mr. Milliron bristles when asked about data mining, a term widely used in the analytics field. “We don’t like mechanistic metaphors that are dehumanizing and let you forget that these are people,” he says.
Rather than a flashing yellow or red light that says that a student is in trouble, the company’s applications, he says, are more likely to point out the next big milestone and the steps students must take to get over the hump and “finish strong.”
Partner colleges, which pay fees based on their size and the services they use, meet with Civitas Learning advisers, who come up with custom-tailored plans. They’re invited to share their experiences at twice-yearly “partner summits.”
W earing a black polo shirt with a Nike swoosh, Mr. Milliron has an athletic build and a friendly demeanor as he offers a tour of the company’s new 27,000-square-foot downtown office in Austin. Young employees in jeans and backpacks sit cross-legged in comfortable chairs around a break table with a half-finished jigsaw puzzle. College pennants hang from the ceiling, and conference rooms are named for campus pubs. A “collaboratory,” furnished with oversized beanbag chairs, has photographs of campus officials taped to windows, with charts outlining the retention problems they’re facing and the solutions a Civitas team is devising.
The third of nine children in a boisterous, multicultural family that over time included 25 foster children, Mr. Milliron was the first in his family to earn a college degree. In high school in Northern California, he says, he was more interested in basketball than in academic matters.
He started out at Mesa Community College, part of Arizona’s Maricopa Community College system. There he met the first of several mentors, James B. Mancuso, a professor of speech communication. He recalls that Mr. Mancuso would not let him coast, once telling him, “You’re going to be dangerous when you decide to try.”
At Mesa, Mr. Milliron was also motivated by a classmate and close friend named Gerardo de los Santos, with whom he went on to receive bachelor’s, master’s, and then doctoral degrees in education administration.
What his own family lacked in higher-education savvy, the de los Santos family was brimming with. Gerardo’s father, Alfredo de los Santos Jr., was a vice chancellor at the Maricopa community colleges. He describes Mr. Milliron as confident and open: “Mark listens well to people, then he takes what he sees, turns it 25 degrees, and creates something new.”
Mr. Mancuso, his former community-college professor, invited him back to campus many years later to speak. “Mark inspires his audiences to reach out and engage those low-income students who, through no fault of their own, sometimes have the least emotional and financial support and means of improving their education,” Mr. Mancuso wrote in an email to The Chronicle.
Many students are “scaffolded” by the stories of relatives and friends who attended college, says Mr. Milliron, but Civitas can do the same for first-generation students by tracking data footprints. “Part of what I love about this job is using the stories of thousands of students who came before to help build a scaffold so more students can make better choices and succeed.”
