Opinion

College students are dropping out in droves. Two sisters could fix that.

In the delta between hype and reality, Americans are more concerned than excited about AI, and it’s hard to blame them. What’s missing are demonstrations of how AI can transform normal people’s present-day lives. That’s why I was excited to meet two Italian sisters, Carolina and Claudia Recchi, who are using AI to bring some sanity to higher education. Business is booming.

The Recchis were born in San Diego (their dad, an underwater photographer, was working on kelp) but grew up in Rome. When Carolina Recchi, now 30, was considering colleges, she had an American passport, the means to pay full-freight and a hard sell from Babson College, an undergraduate business school in Wellesley, Mass. “I remember my first week they opened Target for students from my dorm,” she says. “I had no idea what Target was, so I asked my roommate who was from Iowa, like, ‘Is it a restaurant? Should I dress fancy?’”

What began as an international student orientation problem quickly revealed itself to be an everyday — and every student — problem. For all of Babson’s interest in recruiting Carolina Recchi, no one above the level of dorm resident adviser (a.k.a., a sophomore) bothered to check how she was adapting to college life or its academic rigors.

At Georgetown University, where Claudia Recchi, now 28, enrolled two years later, things were pretty much the same. If there was a request for student feedback, it was Yelp-style reviews of individual courses or professors at the end of a semester, too late to make a difference. “We were stunned at how out-of-touch these schools are with students, their actual customers,” she says. “And these are so-called elite schools. For the 99 percent of students who go somewhere else, the resources are less, and the stakes are much higher.”

You might be picking up the vibe that the Italian part of the Recchis was wildly unimpressed with America. But the American part of them was alive to a screaming business opportunity. The undergraduate dropout rate at American universities is about 36 percent. Every lost student isn’t just a testament to a school’s failure but also revenue that needs to be replaced. For young people, the consequences can be catastrophic. According to the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities, people with bachelor’s degrees average 84 percent higher earnings than people with just a high school diploma, or $1.2 million more over an average lifetime. “We thought, if we had a magic wand and could solve this crisis from scratch, we’d check in with every single student weekly and ask them how they’re doing. Connect them to resources automatically. And memorize what they say and follow up with them two weeks later,” Carolina Recchi says. “But, you know, how could we possibly do that?’”

In 2018, the Recchis launched a company, EdSights, that would text students conventional multiple-choice polls about their well-being. They landed their first client, Missouri Western State University, a public school with about 3,800 students, and discovered they had lifted the lid on a boiling cauldron. Students weren’t just eager to share how they were doing. They texted back desperate for help with everything from jobs and financial aid to counseling and finding the cafeteria. EdSights needed the ability to respond to thousands of students in real time with precise information — at the very moment that AI was making such a thing possible at minimal cost. This is the kind of entrepreneurial timing that builds summer houses.

The company integrated AI through Google’s free Dialogflow, which was then the best platform for building chatbots. (It now licenses ChatGPT-4.) As clients rolled in, the company customized its knowledge base to each university. The bots can be trained with the specific geography of a campus to give directions, as well as with each school’s process for class registration or academic assistance. Security and mental health issues get hard-coded responses to avoid the risk of hallucinations and are referred to emergency or social services. All the student data remains with EdSights and the school.

The bots are a good rapid-response tool for the basics of student life, but the priority remains keeping students enrolled. Every week or so, EdSights texts customized questions that probe the four main reasons students drop out — academic problems, financial distress, illness and social isolation — and follows up with specifics that sort students into risk categories. Because it takes just a few seconds to respond, engagement rates are over 75 percent. All of it is tracked live on a dashboard for academic counselors. With 116 university clients (each pays between $15 and $30 per student, depending on school size) and more than 1 million active students, a six-year-old company has perhaps the world’s most valuable data set on what college students need to navigate their academic lives.

All of this data is useful only if administrators act on it, and it should not be terribly surprising that most EdSights schools are up-and-comers that can’t coast on reputation. The largest customer is Southern New Hampshire University, which claims to be the biggest nonprofit university in America, with a blended on-campus and online enrollment of 125,000 undergraduates. (I had no idea, either.) “We ran a two-term test with EdSights, and the results were unbelievable,” says Scott Barker, who oversees SNHU’s more than 700 academic advisers. SNHU rolled the program out to all of its undergrads in 2023, and now advisers use the dashboard to structure their days. They get alerts about students who are missing classes, running out of money or just feeling lonely, and they reach out to intervene. Meanwhile, EdSights monitors the rest of a student body the size of Columbia, Mo.

In the most recent semester, Barker says persistence — higher ed’s sunnier term for dropouts — improved by more than 2 percent, or about 2,400 students, and was up 4 percent for first-year and minority students. Multiply that by SNHU’s average undergraduate tuition of about $35,000 and the school has saved a lot more than summer house money. “There’s a lifetime value-of-students equation and a cost to acquire students. So once you have them, it’s critical to keep them from a business lens,” Barker says. “But also, we’ve told our students, like, ‘You are going to get the best help here and have the biggest chance to be successful with us.’” SNHU has tens of thousands of military and low-income students. They’re not scraping together tuition just for identity formation or network-building but to get a credential that can improve the financial trajectory of their lives. Helping them avoid pitfalls on the way to a degree is core to the meaning of “in loco parentis.”

We usually haul out Latin only when we’re talking about America’s elite schools. Their stricken presidents don’t need me piling on — they’re busy enough just trying to survive through commencement. But as tuition keeps rising, and the fumes of reputation get thinner, ignoring their student-customers feels like an existential risk. “If you don’t know how students are feeling, it’s hard to put them at the center of the college experience,” Claudia Recchi says. “AI makes hearing them and managing those interactions super easy. It should be an administrator’s best friend.” No one needs a best friend more.