Kalamazoo Valley Community College

KVCC increased student return rate by 215%

Kalamazoo Valley Community College (KVCC) is a two year community college in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The institution was established in 1966 and has roughly 12,000 students enrolled throughout each academic year.

Challenge

KVCC was seeking a partnership that could help them find stopped out students, while also offering the resources and support needed to help bring them back and graduate. This program became a priority after their internal research team discovered that 24.4% or 39,276 Kalamazoo County residents have some college, but no degree. Those, of course, aren’t just students that attended KVCC, but Evan and his team saw it as part of their mission to serve the community and do their part to assist students that stopped out prior to earning their degree.

Solution

Their research for a scalable solution led Evan and his team to ReUp Education. ReUp’s technology makes it possible to find and engage stopouts at scale by combining automated outreach with human touch. As our team of coaches get to know each interested student, they work with them to determine what they need to be successful in their chosen path. In their pilot, the team at KVCC had found it challenging to provide enough support for each returning student, which is a common problem higher ed institutions run into when launching re-entry programs. ReUp’s technology enabled service solves for this by giving coaches the tools they need in order to provide personalized support at scale — while maintaining the quality of our service.

Results year 1

600 +

Stopout students returned

$ 629000 +

Recaptured tuition

“What we found was that it was really, really hard even with that particular incentive to get students to come back. And I think that ultimately what we found is money, in and of itself, was really not enough. It wasn’t enough support.”

— Evan Pauken

Director of Retention and Completion

Challenge

Solution

Results year 1

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