University of Tennessee at Martin

UTM finds an innovative, affordable way to re-engage stopout students

The University of Tennessee at Martin is committed to supporting all of their students, including those who have stopped out without completing their degrees. This is why UTM partnered with ReUp — after realizing they could leverage ReUp’s technology, data, and Success Coaches to better engage, re-enroll, and retain their stopout population to complement and bolster their own efforts, they were hopeful for enrollment success. Particularly, ReUp’s revenue share model has allowed UTM to sustainably bring back students despite having a tight budget, as there are no upfront costs and ReUp is only paid for success. “The revenue-sharing model allows us to help our students in a way that we couldn’t before,” said Jamie Mantooth, UTM’s Executive Director of Enrollment Services and Student Engagement.

Challenge

As a public institution, UTM felt like they had done all they could to get students re-enrolled. They didn’t have the funds to dedicate staff solely to re-enrolling students, nor to the technology that might help them locate and communicate with them. UTM tried sending surveys and ran an engagement campaign. “We tried email. We also sent out postcards with their last known address, but we just didn’t get much back.”

“And so we were left with the question: ‘what do we do with this shockingly large number of students who started with us for a good reason but didn’t complete, and how do we get them back?”

Solution

ReUp’s expertise in bringing stopout students back was just what UTM needed. What interested them most was how little financial risk there was to start benefiting from ReUp’s services — ReUp is only compensated when a student re-enrolls and persists.

Much of the student contact information provided by UTM was outdated. All of these students had been away from UTM for at least one year, but many had been away for 5-10 years or more. ReUp was able to append over 40% of these student records with current email addresses and phone numbers, leading to success in engaging these students who would have otherwise fallen out of UTM’s reach.

By partnering with ReUp, UTM solved multiple problems all at once: ReUp’s service, which engages effectively and adaptively to students at scale, gave UTM access to those students they had been unable to reach on their own. And what’s more, the revenue-share pricing model was not only appropriate for UTM’s limited budget, but it also opened up a pathway to recover tuition revenue.

Results

150

Stopout students re-enrolled in the first 18 months of the partnership

$ 890000 +

Recaptured tuition

To put it simply, it works. I really expected ReUp to hit the same wall that we hit. In fact, when I talk to other schools about your process, I refer to it as the ReUp fairy dust. I don’t know how you make this work. It just works.

— Jamie Mantooth

Executive Director of Enrollment Services and Student Engagement at UTM

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