What Prevents Isolation and Dropout for Nontraditional Students? Connection

Produced by Carmen Mendoza.

Following is a transcript of the conversation. “There is a myriad of services that are typically available on campus that just aren’t available in the online world. And, as a result, those students are dropping out at twice the rate as their on-campus peers.” —Melvin Hines

Goldie Blumenstyk: Welcome to Innovation That Matters, a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast sponsored by HP. In this special series, we’ll be sharing the stories of change-makers working to improve equity in higher education. Hello, I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, and that voice you just heard is Melvin Hines, the co-founder and CEO of Upswing. Hey, Melvin, thanks for joining us today.

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Melvin Hines: Thank you for having me.

Blumenstyk: Upswing offers tutoring, coaching, a bunch of other services that I think we’ll get to, but before we do that, what really strikes me about your company is not so much about what you’re offering, but who you’re offering it to. Can you tell me a little bit about your approach to who you want to serve?

Hines: Yeah, sure. So Upswing works with colleges and universities to improve the graduation rates of online and nontraditional students. And by nontraditional, we typically refer to adult learners, student parents, veterans, first-generation students, basically those who don’t look like your typical 18- to 22-year-old on campus.

Blumenstyk: And why do you focus in on that population?

Hines: The biggest reason is that nontraditional students don’t get access to the same resources that everyone else does. If you are a working mom, and you’re watching a classroom video, you don’t get the opportunity to then ask a professor a question. For example, if you’re thinking about changing your major, who do you speak to about that? There is a myriad of services that are typically available on campus that just aren’t available in the online world. And, as a result, those students are dropping out at twice the rate as their on-campus peers. What’s even more unfortunate is that they pay the exact same amount in tuition as everyone else, and they don’t get the opportunity to get those same types of resources. And so we want to be able to help solve that.

Blumenstyk: What are some of the other challenges that you found that nontraditional students are facing?

Hines: Yeah, well, you know, it starts from Day 1. When you’re a nontraditional student and you are taking classes, it can feel isolating. You don’t get that camaraderie, that rah-rah feel that you typically expect from a college experience. No one seems to be there to help you ensure that you’re going to graduate. If you go to class tomorrow, that’s on you. And if you decide not to go to class tomorrow, that’s on you. I think that’s the single biggest issue that nontraditional students face is that they seem to feel like they’re out on an island.

Blumenstyk: They don’t have a cohort. They don’t have island mates, I guess.

Hines: Exactly, exactly. And then on top of that, you have all the added burdens of being a mom, for example, being a child to aging parents who you might be having to take care of, having to be someone who’s working, having to figure out your college career after returning as a veteran. There are all these just additional burdens that are on you, and suddenly you’re having to figure out this entire thing called college as well. And so we want to really help them to navigate those sometimes tumultuous circumstances that are keeping them from being able to finish the race. And ideally, we want to help them to improve their families’ lives and their lives and really kind of change things for the future for themselves.

Blumenstyk: I mean, obviously, this past year, 15 months or so with Covid, there have been a lot of really extra burdens placed on all students, but certainly nontraditional students, people who have been working, people who have been trying to do homeschooling with their children while they themselves have been going to school. What did you discover this year? What were the particular challenges that students you were serving were facing that were really Covid related?

Hines: Oh, man, where do you even begin? I would say the very first thing that we saw out the gate was a bit of a shock factor of: Suddenly you have to become this remote student. Because nontraditional students aren’t always online students. A lot of them are taking night and weekend classes. But when college shut down, they suddenly had to transition to be an online student. A lot of them weren’t used to the technologies that people were using; things like Zoom and so many others to connect in with campuses weren’t familiar to them. On top of that, a lot of them were also parents. And so suddenly they didn’t just have to figure out how to be a remote student themselves, they had to figure out how to become a tutor, a teacher, and everything else for their kids at the exact same time. A lot of them didn’t have access to good broadband. Many didn’t even have access to laptops. In fact, several students reached out to us requesting, Is there any way that I can get in touch outside of a laptop? Because I don’t have one. And then after all that finally got settled in, and people were coming up with ways to circumnavigate those circumstances, they suddenly were hit with isolationism, hit with anxiety over a pandemic that was spreading across the world and, you know, killing untold numbers of people. And they were recognizing that there wasn’t really an outlet for them to connect to those who could help them just make sense of the world. It’s all those reasons all together that we saw so many students decide that: You know what, this just isn’t for me. And they ultimately dropped out and have wondered whether or not they are capable of coming back and finishing where they began.

Blumenstyk: So in response to all those kinds of challenges that you saw this year and in previous years, how has Upswing adapted its operations? I think initially you were started primarily as a tutoring service, but it seems like you’ve broadened your reach a little bit.

Hines: That’s true. That’s true. Even before Covid, we were looking at: How can we support students all along their entire journey? So we started in the academic space with tutoring, and then we eventually added on the ability for advisers to connect with students virtually. But then we started thinking about, Well, how do we create that community aspect? And we did that by developing Ana, which is a virtual assistant that’s completely over text message and that will reach out to students and nudge them and encourage them and remind them on important dates and topics that they need to stay on top of. So we were kind of already thinking about, How can we continue to expand the work that we’re doing to ensure that those stumbling blocks don’t become insurmountable for the students that are nontraditional students?

Blumenstyk: So, Ana, it’s like a chatbot or something? Is Ana a person, or is Ana an AI tool?

Hines: Ana is actually a mix of both. So 80 percent of the questions can be answered automatically through Ana, but the main goal of Ana is to understand what the real struggle is of the student that Ana is speaking to and figure out how we can connect that student to someone on campus who can help them to better navigate those tumultuous waters. So, for example, you might have a student who is in a math class, and Ana may say, Hey, I see you have a calculus test coming up soon. Are you prepared? Do you feel ready for it? And the student can reply back and say, No, I’m really struggling. Well, Ana will be able to recognize that that is taking place and then will connect in with someone who’s actually a calculus tutor on their campus, find out what time they’re available next, and shoot back those available times. And so what Ana is doing is giving the students the ability to take control of their future all through text message. And by doing that, what we’ve seen is that we’ve been able to increase persistence rates and ultimately graduation rates by between 10 and 15 percent.

Blumenstyk: And if I’m a student, let’s say I’m that mom you talk about, 32-year-old working mom, and I need a tutor, how does that work? How do I find a tutor? Is it somebody who’s on my campus? How do I sort of make those connections?

Hines: So for each school that we work with, starting with the learning-center department, we want to make sure that all the tutors have a profile on Upswing’s platform with their scheduling capability so that we can make those connections as necessary. But, especially for some of our smaller campuses, it’s really difficult for them to create a 24/7 experience. So if someone is not available, all that student has to do is just continue to scroll down on the page, and they will actually see Upswing’s tutors that are available 24/7 in over 400 different topics to complete and round out that experience for them. It’s completely paid for by the school. We did not want this to be something that students paid for, because if we do that, we’re exacerbating that gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Blumenstyk: And so then I’m a student, and I’m looking for tutors. How do I know I’m getting a good tutor? How do I know I’m getting a tutor who I’m going to click with?

Hines: Yeah, so it’s an entire rating system that’s going on, kind of similar to Airbnb or something like that, where you can see how previous students have rated that same tutor. But we also make sure that we are keeping a high quality. Our coach-management team ensures that the coaches are at least four stars or above on every one of their sessions. They also make sure that they’re responding in a timely manner to each one of the sessions and that by default, every session has audio, video, chat, whiteboards, screen sharing, document uploads, basically everything that you need to have as close to an in-person experience as possible.

Blumenstyk: I guess I can pick, right? I don’t necessarily want some hotshot 20-year-old who might not really understand what I’m going through.

Hines: So what we found is that students do tend to pick people who resonate most with them. In one of our earlier studies, we found that many of our students that are English-language learners, whose first language is primarily Spanish, were much, much more likely to pick our tutors that were also showing that they were fluent in Spanish. What was really interesting about that is that this wasn’t just for things that were, say, English courses or things of that nature. It could be for a math course, but people want that familiarity.

Blumenstyk: How many schools are you working with right now?

Hines: We’re working with almost 70 colleges and universities around the country. Fifteen percent of HBCUs are partnered with us, which we’re really proud of, and we have a very significant contingent of Hispanic-serving institutions as well. I would say it is mostly rural. We are beginning to see more and more of the urban colleges come on board as well. But that rural aspect was something that was important to me because of where I grew up. I grew up in a small town in south Georgia. And so I really wanted to give back to the same types of communities that I grew up in. When I started Upswing, I felt pretty certain that while there were a lot of innovations happening in all these major cities — you know, Geoffrey Canada doing great things in New York, Urban Prep in Chicago, Sal Khan out in California, Michelle Rhee in D.C. — none of those things seemed to be trickling down to Albany, Ga. And so this was who we wanted to help support, first and foremost.

Blumenstyk: Do you think that’s just because some of these institutions don’t have the resources to have their own suite of services of the kind that you can supplement?

Hines: I do. You know, one of the colleges that we worked with, prior to us beginning to work with them, they would bus in their tutors every single day from the nearest city, which was about an hour and a half away. But they really needed nursing tutors to help support their nursing students. Otherwise their students were dropping out left and right. And so it was really, really costly for them. And it also wasn’t a good experience for their tutors, because if the tutors drove all the way down to the small town, and there were no people there to actually tutor, maybe someone didn’t show up for their meeting or something like that, it was a very long and difficult drive back home. So by being able to utilize something like Upswing, suddenly they were able to connect in virtually with students. They were able to bring more people to support those college students and increase their graduation rates. That’s something that we’ve wanted to do across the board for many community colleges and HBCUs and HSIs in rural communities around the country.

Blumenstyk: And with that, let’s pause for a message from our sponsor.

Mike Belcher: Hi, I’m Mike Belcher, HP’s director of ed-tech innovation. Just wanted to spend a couple of minutes with you on a topic that I think is so important, and the academic welfare of our students desperately going to be needed for their long-term financial and economic success. But we also have to think through some of the support mechanisms that we’re going to be faced with that we just haven’t been faced with, at least in our generations. And there’s a great article by Kira Newman from Berkeley.edu about the seven ways the pandemic is affecting our mental health, and I want to spend a little bit of time on this, and then we think we’re going to have to at least take maybe a different approach this fall. Those top seven items were: We’re anxious, depressed, we’re traumatized. I think all of us are feeling that, and whether we realize it or not, some of that is coming out in ways that maybe we’re not ourselves, or we’re behaving in a different way. There’s a sense of loneliness for many people, but not everyone. And some people have really thrived in this challenge. But we have to realize that we’re not all in the same boat. We’re seeing things like domestic-violence rates go up. We’re seeing all sorts of different effects happening based on your personality type, based on your lifestyle, your health and demographic. And so we’re all handling this differently, and we’re all being affected differently. And definitely it is worse for our disadvantaged students. In this article, David Sbarra said, “It’s an inescapable fact that people lower on the socioeconomic ladder are struggling more.” And so the more disadvantaged, and the more ways we’re disadvantaged, whether that’s our gender, our race, our socioeconomic standing, whatever any of those disadvantages or challenges are, this is just compounding those effects. And that our work situation matters as well, right? And how prepared we are for the continuation of this, the uncertainty of it.

And so that’s where I want to spend just a little bit of time on how this really hit me, and how it’s kind of changing my own views and maybe how we’re looking at this at HP. What can we do for ourselves and for our students that are facing these challenges? And I think we first off have to ask ourselves that question and ask them that question. We don’t know where they’re at. We have to help them and ourselves recognize the negative effects of staying so connected to much of the news and social media, which is dragging a lot of this, trying to keep us connected to their platforms, while passing along maybe not the best information that’s going to help us all. That we do need to stay connected emotionally to our friends and our family, our co-workers, our fellow students. And ask our students and our faculty members, Do they have support? Who is there? And if there are more support capabilities, I think we need to look at, How can we build those? And this fall may be the perfect time for us to maybe soft-roll the academics. This may be the time to take several weeks and really spend that time in getting to know our students and allowing them to know us, how we’re all rolling through this, how we can all help each other, how we can be empathetic. It’s starting to show that empathy again, right? And being good human beings.

And if you haven’t already been pulling all of the resources together that you have available for not just your students, but for your faculty, for your staff, and support teams to mental-, physical-, and financial-health resources, we’ve got to do this. Without holding the hearts and minds of our faculty and our students, we can never reach into their minds, and we can’t open their minds to learn new things. So this is that one chance, this one opportunity that we may never see again. Let’s make sure we take advantage of doing the right thing. And I hope this was helpful. Please, I hope you continue to enjoy the session and all of the sessions that The Chronicle does for higher education. We greatly appreciate it. Thank you all so much, and please be safe and take care of yourselves.

Blumenstyk: Thanks for that. And now let’s continue the conversation with Melvin Hines, the co-founder and CEO of Upswing. You know, I’m always fascinated by the origin stories for these organizations and companies whose founders I talk to. You’re not like a tech dude from the start here. You’re actually a lawyer originally?

Hines: That’s true, that’s true.

Blumenstyk: And a law-school professor who left to start this venture. What was the formative moment for you, when you realized not just from your personal experience growing up in Albany, Ga., but even when you were in law school, or even when you were teaching law, that you decided to make this transition?

Hines: Yeah, so there were a couple of places where I would say they were pretty formative for me. The first was when I was in Albany, Ga., going to high school there. There were a lot of barriers, let’s say, to success there, as well, in a lot of ways. I was one of 250 students to start my freshman year in high school, and by graduation, only 68 of us graduated, and even fewer were going off to college. So when I got an opportunity to go to the University of Georgia, it was a really big deal and got written up in the newspaper and all that good stuff. But once I arrived there, I began to see that for a lot of the students there, UGA was more of a fallback school than anything because the whole world was open to them. They had gone to all these affluent high schools, you know, and that really led me to ask the question of: Why is it that where you are born and where you live dictate so much of your lot in life? And how can we change that? From then on, I knew I would be hooked on this idea of educational equality. And I started a tutoring/mentoring organization. I went to law school, with the focus of wanting to even the playing field there as well, and started a law review called the Forum for Law & Social Change. Our first year’s theme was on educational inequality. And I had the opportunity through our conference to meet with the dean of North Carolina Central, who said, Hey, we’re actually trying to tackle the same issue here with first-generation law students, and we’d love your help. And so I did that for three years part time while I was also in law school and began to recognize that, man, a lot of the questions people were asking me weren’t academic in nature. They were people who were trying to just understand life and navigate these difficult hurdles through their educational experience. And so that’s when I said, You know what, I would really love to create a platform that is going to scale to support more than, say, the 20 or so students that I’m teaching — to help more and more students. And the end result has been that over the last few years, we’ve been able to help prevent nearly 50,000 dropouts from occurring.

Blumenstyk: I want to talk about those dropouts in a second. But first, I think I read somewhere that both of your parents were going to college while you were growing up?

Hines: That’s true — both of my parents were nontraditional students. My dad went to Valdosta State University, which is about an hour and a half south of where I grew up. And my mom went to Georgia Southwestern State University, which was about 45 minutes north of there. The reason why I mentioned the time is because this was pre-internet days, so being a remote student meant that you actually got in the car after work and drove. And so I would be in that car, and while my parents were taking their classes, I’d be doing my homework on the steps. And this seemed to go on forever. You know, it was just like, Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? And I finally had the opportunity to see what it was all for when I saw my mom graduate as valedictorian of her class and address the class. And that really changed the trajectory for my family for sure. You know, I, of course, went on to law school and business school and started Upswing. And our brother is currently in medical school up at NYU, and my sister has done a lot of great things working for the federal government down in Florida. So it’s really changed our trajectory and given us the ability to dream higher in a lot of ways. I think that for a lot of families out there who are trying to reskill themselves in light of changing career paths and jobs that are being downsized, it’s just as important for them. And I think that we need to make sure not to forget about those families, and to ensure that they are part of the prosperity that we want to see in this country.

Blumenstyk: So interesting that you say that. I’ve written a lot about adult students over the years, and I often hear from people about how this does change the trajectory for families. And, you know, that it’s never too late to have this happen for a family. That if someone didn’t do it in their 20s, they can still do it in their 30s and their 50s even.

Hines: Exactly, you know, the majority of the students who are on our platform are adult learners. I think around a third of all students are student parents on our platform. And so we certainly hear and see those stories, and the success stories are definitely making it all worth the work that we’re doing.

Blumenstyk: So let’s talk about that impact for a minute. You said you think you’ve averted 47,000 dropouts, I guess, since 2017. How do you define that?

Hines: Yeah, so we work with our institutions to pull a lot of the data that they have around students who are retained from semester to semester and those who are dropping out. We’ve also been able to pair that data with the usage on Upswing’s platform to find out what exactly is the impact of our work. I think what I’m most proud of, though, is that although we have done some internal studies ourselves and maybe have about a half-dozen studies, others have actually done independent studies that verify it from the outside as well. So, for example, the Houston Community College system conducted a study a few years back, actually in accordance with Rice University researchers. And they found that for every interaction on Upswing’s platform, student GPAs are increasing by an average of 0.04, and it stacks. So that means that if you go in five times, that increases your GPA by an average of 0.2 points. And what they concluded was that this cuts across all socioeconomic categories. So it doesn’t matter how prepared or unprepared you might be because of your familial status, because of your family’s ability to, you know, tell you things that maybe others didn’t know. If you use Upswing, we can actually help you to get to the same level as those who came in completely prepared for college.

Blumenstyk: You know, Melvin, as I’ve been doing these podcasts, I’ve come across some pretty distressing statistics on the ability of Black and brown entrepreneurs to attract capital. In reading up about you in the start-up of your company, it seems like you encountered some of the same challenges: reached out to a lot of a lot of potential investors and didn’t get much uptake. How did you keep yourself going after all that?

Hines: Yeah, it was a challenge. It’s a very weird feeling to have something that you’ve just committed so much of your blood, sweat, and tears toward, and then you can have someone judge it in 30 seconds. But I think that it was also a bit disheartening sometimes to not necessarily get some of the benefits that maybe you saw other people get. For example, many of our first accelerators and things like that that we were doing, we were by far the furthest along of any of the organizations that were there. It was as if we had to prove ourselves more than anyone else time and time again just to get the exact same type of benefit. And, you know, that was certainly frustrating. At the same time, I think that that’s not unique to the entrepreneurship world. I think that that’s something that in a lot of spaces, particularly spaces that aren’t used to seeing people of color in them, you’re going to have to prove yourself to a much greater extent than your counterparts. You know, when we needed to raise institutional funding, I had no people to reach out to. I had tapped all of our angel investors — we were done with that. I don’t have — you know, my friends and family are not people who can give checks like that. And so it was starting cold, and it was reaching out to hundreds and hundreds of people. And fortunately, there was one person who gave us a chance. And once that person gave us a chance, everything else spiraled, because that’s kind of the way it works in VC funding. But, man, it took forever to get that first person.

Blumenstyk: You’ve been at this now, I guess, since 2013. Are there some things that you’re doing really differently now because of what you’ve learned in the earlier days?

Hines: There are a lot of aspects that we’ve certainly rethought since the beginning. We thought students who were struggling academically were the ones that were most likely to drop out of school. And so if we could just help them with, you know, 24/7 access to tutoring and advising, that we could help them to get over the hurdle. What we’ve since learned is that that’s just a small piece of the entire pie — that you have students that are dealing with the fact that their car just broke down, and now they’re trying to figure out how they can get to school and to work. That you’re having students have to deal with, say, an aging parent who is now sick. You know, people who’ve seen death, unfortunately, as a result of Covid. And that’s starting to cause them to rethink just everything about what they originally thought pre-2020 was going to be their trajectory in life. And so then the question becomes: How can we help support them beyond just academics? How can we provide mental health and wellness? How can we help provide financial help and wellness? How does this go beyond just the classroom to things like babysitting services and other areas that are showing that we really want to create a village approach for these nontraditional students because for so long they suffered in silence.

Blumenstyk: I’m so glad we had a chance to chat today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Hines: Thank you. Really good to be here.

Blumenstyk: This has been Innovation That Matters, a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast sponsored by HP. For additional episodes, look for us on the Chronicle website or your favorite podcast app. I’m Goldie Blumenstyk.