You Can Help Make Sure Freshmen Show Up. Here’s How.

The summer before he started college, Austin Birchell ran into a major snag. He was counting on a state merit scholarship to cover a significant chunk of his tuition at Georgia State University. But the bill was due soon, and he still hadn’t received his financial-aid award.

To figure out why, he’d have to tangle with an unfamiliar bureaucracy. Neither of his parents had attended college. His family “didn’t know anything about college as a system,” he recalls.

But Birchell did know where to turn for help. Georgia State had just rolled out a chatbot system, named “Pounce,” after the university’s mascot, a panther. Throughout the summer, Pounce sent incoming students text-message reminders. And it responded to their questions.

With Pounce’s help, Birchell figured out that his concern about the missing aid award was well founded. In the end, he and his mother drove to campus, walked into the financial-aid office — Pounce told him where it was — and resolved the issue in person. Somewhere along the way, it turned out, Birchell’s Social Security number had been written down incorrectly. As soon as they fixed the discrepancy and had the scholarship applied to the balance, Birchell and his mom walked across the hall to pay his bill.

“If it hadn’t been for Pounce,” Birchell says, “I don’t know if I would have been starting that semester.”

Each year, at just about every college, some fraction of the freshman class that has paid deposits never shows up. Admissions officials call the phenomenon “summer melt": Students “melt” out of the class between making their enrollment deposit in the spring and the start of the fall semester. The reasons for melt aren’t always clear, but research suggests that the many administrative tasks that students must complete during the summer — often with little help — plays a role.

Summer melt is one more factor that makes it hard for a college to project an all-important number: how many students it will have in the fall. Bring in fewer freshmen than intended, and a college might not have sufficient tuition revenue to cover its expenses. For many colleges, then, courting students throughout the summer has become standard practice. This contact is both practical, helping students through a series of required to-dos, and emotional, nurturing a bond to the college they’ve chosen.

It’s one thing to realize the importance of communicating with incoming students. It’s another to do it well — especially for colleges that have a lot of them. Georgia State brings in close to 4,000 freshmen each fall. At least 35 percent of them are first-generation, and 58 percent are low-income. Those student populations are hardly monolithic, but on balance they’re less likely to have access to college guidance during the summer.

Before Pounce, helping students navigate the summer fell to people like Bianca M. Lopez. A senior admissions counselor, Lopez is the primary contact for several thousand prospective students at Georgia State. Responding to their questions often consumed her lunch breaks and evenings, she says, and it was still a struggle to give everyone a timely response. “It seems like it wouldn’t take a lot of time to answer similar questions over and over,” Lopez says, but she found that it kept her from other parts of her job.

Not only did students have to wait to hear back from staff members, says Timothy M. Renick, vice president for enrollment management and student success, but the answers they got might not be consistent, or complete. There had to be a better way.

Summer melt is obviously a challenge for colleges. But until recently, its impact on students was less clear. For a long time, high schools assumed that students who graduated with specific college plans followed through on them. Colleges figured that expected students who never materialized had enrolled somewhere else instead.

That started to change about five years ago, when a pair of researchers set out to quantify the extent to which students with concrete college plans melted out of postsecondary education altogether. Earlier studies indicated that disadvantaged students were more likely to forgo college, even after being admitted and making a deposit. So the researchers, Ben Castleman and Lindsay C. Page, focused on pockets of the country with significant low-income-student populations. Their findings were striking: Around 20 percent of low-income students who were set to attend a four-year college do not actually enroll anywhere.

Castleman, now an assistant professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia, and Page, now an assistant professor of education and a research scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, tested a couple of approaches for increasing the number of low-income students who enrolled in college as planned. One took the form of a behavioral intervention, or “nudge,” which seeks to address the cognitive, emotional, and social reasons people don’t follow through on their intentions.

The researchers designed a series of text messages that counselors and advisers working with collegebound students could send to nudge them along on the tasks they needed to complete over the summer. The texts also provided students with an opportunity to connect with a counselor if they had questions. The text messages raised enrollment among students at several of the research sites, making the biggest difference where students had less access to college-planning help.

The summer-melt research caught Renick’s attention. He read Castleman and Page’s 2014 book, Summer Melt: Supporting Low-Income Students Through the Transition to College, and had the heads of all the offices he oversees read it, too.

Georgia State is well known in higher-education circles for the sophisticated way it collects and uses student data. But it didn’t know what happened to students who melted out of its class. Inspired by Castleman and Page’s work, Renick decided to investigate. Using data from the National Student Clearinghouse, university officials determined that 300 of the 900 students who melted out of its class in 2015 had not gone to college anywhere a year later. Worse, more than 70 percent of them were low-income students, and three-quarters were students of color. Fixing melt, Renick decided, wasn’t just about raising enrollment or bringing in revenue. It was a matter of equity.

Georgia State worked with AdmitHub, a company that helps prospective students navigate the admissions process, to create Pounce. AdmitHub asked Page for help in designing the messages. She agreed, on the condition that when the new tool was rolled out, in 2016, there was a control group, so that she could study it.

Pounce’s messages are more tailored than the ones sent in her previous experiments, Page says. Pounce sits on top of Georgia State’s student-data systems, so it knows which students need which prompts. So, for instance, a reminder that housing deposits are due is sent only to those students who have not yet made theirs.

That kind of personalization, Page says, could reduce the chances that students begin to tune the messages out. But there is a potential drawback to this approach, she says. Colleges have a vested interest in not just if but where students enroll. That doesn’t concern her in the case of Georgia State, Page says. But “you could think of sort of a bad scenario, where predatory for-profit institutions say, ‘Oh, we’re going to do this, too,’ and it ending up being a great strategy for them to recruit students.”

Students can also text Pounce with a specific question. When they do, the system uses artificial intelligence to match their query with one of 2,000 prepared answers — a number that grows as Pounce encounters new questions. In most cases, there’s a good match. If there isn’t an appropriate answer in the system, the message is forwarded to a staff member, who responds by hand. That’s necessary less than 5 percent of the time.

Pounce’s early results are promising. It has significantly reduced how long students must wait to get an answer to their questions, Renick says. And Georgia State has learned that some students are more comfortable asking questions of Pounce than they are asking a staff member.

Student feedback also suggests that Pounce helps students maintain their sense of independence. Talking with a staff member on the phone, students reported, felt like having someone else solve their problems. “But with the chatbot, with Pounce,” Renick says, “it was like I was using a tool, and I was solving the problem for myself.”

Summer melt was about 20 percent lower for students who had Pounce than those in the control group, Page found. If it had been available to the whole incoming class, she estimated, 116 more students would have enrolled.

Based on that evidence, the university decided to make Pounce available to all of its incoming students starting last summer.

Paola Berrios, a freshman who plans to major in political science, is a fan. She has the contact in her phone saved as “Pounce” with an emoji of a robot.

Before she got to campus, Berrios asked Pounce a bunch of questions, including some she didn’t think were important enough to ask a real person — like the dorm’s policy on pets. She saved the message it sent on the first day of classes: “WELCOME,” it said with a party emoji. “We hope you’re as excited to be here as we are to have you on campus.” Berrios is well aware that these messages are from a bot. Still, she says, “personalized stuff always feels really nice.”

Georgia State hopes to maintain students’ connection with Pounce even after they enroll. The university is weaving into the chatbot the proactive academic advising it already offers, with an eye toward confronting challenges, academic and otherwise, that can lead students to drop out. That information, Georgia State hopes, will help close the achievement gap for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The goal, Renick says, is to give students “timely information to make good decisions at every juncture along the way.”

Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.