"Wouldn't it be nice if kids could text their way to college?"
After a decade running Signet Education, a tutoring and admissions practice I started in a Cambridge apartment, I had a simple problem: students didn't answer emails or phone calls. The ones who got expert guidance thrived; the ones who didn't fell through the cracks.
One day I wondered out loud whether kids could text their way to college. Before I could explain how dumb that was, my friend Kirk Daulerio, a former admissions officer at Princeton, Penn, and Bowdoin, was telling me to build it. So we co-founded AdmitHub.
Pounce
Off-the-shelf AI didn't know what a "quad" was, or that Georgia State's orientation was called "Incept," so we built our own natural-language system for higher education, and patented it. It used neural attention, the core mechanism behind today's transformer models, to read students' texts, misspellings and shorthand included, and it learned on the fly from staff feedback. With Georgia State University, we launched Pounce, a chatbot that texted admitted students through the summer before college.
In a randomized controlled trial, Pounce exchanged nearly 200,000 messages with 3,100 students and cut summer melt by 21%. Enrollment rose 3.9%, worth about $3 million in tuition, and Georgia State posted the best enrollment in its history.
Proving it, again and again
The same idea applied to every part of college life, from financial aid to housing to a FAFSA question at 1 a.m. So in 2018–19, we tested whether AI could help students stay in college, not just arrive. Georgia State's head of student success and the lead researcher summed up the randomized trial:
"Conversational AI chatbots… helped Georgia State boost rates of FAFSA filing and registration for the subsequent fall semester by 3 percentage points. Scaled to the entire Georgia State undergraduate student body, an impact of this magnitude translates to more than 1,300 students taking the next step in their college journey who otherwise might have stopped out or been stuck in place."
— Tim Renick, Georgia State University, and Lindsay Page, University of Pittsburgh, in Higher Ed Dive, 2020
We didn't stop there. Working with independent researchers, including Brown University's Annenberg Institute, we ran trial after trial. At Georgia State Perimeter College, students who got AI nudges were 16% more likely to file their FAFSA on time and 14% more likely to register early. Twelve trials in all.
Becoming Mainstay
We'd outgrown admissions. AdmitHub became Mainstay: an engagement platform supporting students from enrollment through graduation, built as a public benefit corporation with its mission written into its charter.
AI plus people
Our most important finding: AI is at its best when it multiplies people.
When just 2% of messages came from a real human, follow-through tripled. Students open up to AI because it doesn't judge them, but they need a person to feel accountable to.
Mainstay grew to 300+ college and government partners, reached more than 20 million students, and hit $13M ARR on $20M raised from impact investors, profitably.
The exit
Mainstay was acquired by Lemnis, the nonprofit that also acquired InsideTrack, to combine AI with human coaching at national scale. The mission now has a permanent home.