Fight ‘Summer Melt’

Help Make Sure Freshmen Show Up 3 — iStock

Each year, thousands of students intending to go to college fail to actually enroll. Georgia State University takes a high-tech but personalized approach to getting them to campus in the fall.

Austin Birchell, a first-generation student whose family "didn’t know anything about college as a system," he says, used Georgia State’s chatbot to help him fix a financial-aid problem before his freshman year began.

Admissions

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

By Beckie Supiano

Colleges are experimenting with a high-tech system that uses old-fashioned personal attention to curb enrollment’s “summer melt.”