Startups for student success: how technology can help universities create a stellar student experience

Student success and non-academic experience in HE market map, by Emerge Education.

We’re building our annual list of the top emerging edtech companies in higher education for 2024, in collaboration with our Higher Education Edtech advisory board which is convened in partnership with Jisc and chaired by Mary Curnock Cook, CBE. As we do this, we’re diving into the trends and opportunities for innovation along each step of the learner journey → from student recruitment and enrolment to teaching and learning, from assessment to graduate employability.

In this second article, we’ll look at how edtech startups can help universities solve their biggest challenges in non-academic support and facilitating student success by addressing their experience outside of the classroom: campus facilities, wellbeing, financial support and more.

The student journey in higher education.

Read on for:

• Challenges, trends and opportunities, including our predictions for the transformative impact of genAI
• Views from sector experts, plus tips for founders
• A mini-market map of key players and top emerging startups in this space

Keywords: student success, campus life, student loan, mental health and wellbeing, student finance, disability support

💡 Why it matters

Poor student experience is costing universities more than £1.5bn every year. Financial and emotional hardships are fuelling dropout rates, in the UK and elsewhere, as students increasingly consider alternative options for further study. Under pressure to maintain student numbers in the face of a shift towards recruitment-based funding, it is therefore vital that — alongside retention during the enrolment journey — universities also look at ways to prepare, integrate and support students arriving on campuses or to virtual study, with an eye to helping them stay on track to graduate with the skills and resilience they need to face the future.

🏈 State of play

• Higher education is facing significant headwinds, as institutions are left reeling from enrollment, budget and student retention challenges. Lack of engagement and communication is a recurring theme among these critical issues, according to both students and universities.
• Mental health has been moving up the educational agenda in recent years, surfacing complex issues that have a massive impact on learning experiences and outcomes. Since the alienation many students experienced during the emergency online pivot of the Covid-19 pandemic, universities have been proactively trying to design programming that helps build cohesion within and across cohorts of students. But cultivating a strong sense of belonging, community and connection across different modalities is proving a tough proposition. In 2022, the AdvanceHE/HEPI survey first asked about loneliness; almost one in four students reported feeling lonely most or all of the time. That figure has since increased from 23% to 26% in 2023 — and it is four times worse than the one in 20 adults who said they were similarly lonely in the most recent data for the UK general population. In late 2023, a new Student Mental Health Evidence Hub, funded by the Office for Students (OfS) and led by the Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes (TASO), was launched to support the rising number of students reporting mental health difficulties.
• A survey conducted last September by Save the Student found students’ living costs had increased by 14% in 12 months. A 2023 survey of Russell Group students in the UK revealed that 94% had concerns about living costs, while 1 in 4 were regularly going without food and other necessities — a figure that rises to more than 3 in 10 for students from the most socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.
• The result is that a majority of UK students (55%) are now working part-time alongside their studies, according to the HEPI/Advance HE student academic experience survey. 2023 was the first year this was the case. Nearly half of UK universities include information about part-time work on their websites, with many providing job ‘hubs’ listing details of jobs to help students with their search, but while universities sometimes actively encourage students to gain work experience to enhance their employability, this brings significant risks. When students work more hours than they can manage, it risks compromising their studies (students in paid employment work an average of 13.5 hours per week), while those students who have to work part-time may be cut off from universities who prohibit it. WonkHE found that student experiences of work can be more negative than positive and can affect not only academic performance and wellbeing, but also impact students’ long-term attitudes to work.
• These pressures are creating a perfect storm. Last year, one in six undergraduates in the UK reported experiencing mental health challenges — and the general upwards trend in mental health problems predates both the cost of living crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Students are around 25 percentage points more likely to select mental health as the primary motivation for wanting to drop out compared with any other explanation, making it by far the most common reason. It is important to note that experiences of mental health among undergraduates are deeply unequal, with some groups much more affected than others.
• All of these issues have a more pronounced effect on first-generation students and students from low-income backgrounds. According to research from EAB, one third of first-gen students drop out within 3 years, compared to only 14% of continuing generation students.

“Many universities are not sufficiently set up to help students with all their issues outside of teaching and learning. And to the extent that they are, often these services are not joined up and are difficult to access, whether because students don’t fully know what’s available to them or, often more, there is more demand than the service can cope with.”

Emma Lancaster, exCEO, Study Group and Emerge VP

🚨 Challenges

• Universities are spending tens of millions each year to support students through financial challenges, as maintenance support fails to keep step with the rising cost of living. One in 10 UK universities has been giving out food vouchers. More than a quarter of universities have student food banks.
• The impact can be profound, from distress for students affected to an increased risk of withdrawing from university. Universities face pressure on institutional counselling services and a need to place more resources into mental health support. IPPR research found that over the past five years 94% of universities have experienced a sharp increase in the number of people trying to access support services, with some institutions noticing a threefold increase.
• Student services are under increasing pressure due to these challenges, coupled with rises in student registrations and funding shortfalls across the sector. Professional services are struggling to meet demand. At some universities one in four students are using, or waiting to use, counselling services.
• Fragmented institutional infrastructure and user interfaces are still major barriers. It is well known that disaggregated, piecemeal legacy IT systems are holding universities back from curating a holistic single view of their students that would enable rapid, personalised intervention. Putting analytics and data governance at the heart of these services could help institutions to more effectively tackle these pressures and better support students.

🔥 Trends

Student experience and success is a very personal and diverse area; students aim to obtain very different outcomes, from finding out what they want to be, to career entry, career advancement, career change, relocation or social aspects like networking. To cater to this very diverse set of demands, the key is to personalise — only digital solutions will enable this kind of personalised student experience at scale and in a financially-viable way. AI will be instrumental in opening up many new ways to cater to this.

Sven Schuett, CEO, IU International University of Applied Sciences and Emerge VP

• Technology that helps students develop their sense of identity as a university student, builds their sense of belonging within a campus/virtual learning community, and normalises help-seeking behaviour as part of the university experience are all necessary to support students to cultivate the mental and emotional capacity required to focus on their study and career goals.
• Non-academic support and student success is a crowded, complex category with many players and overlapping feature sets. At a high level, we categorise solutions into three functions that higher education institutions perform: (1) identifying students who need support; (2) connecting them to services based on those needs; and (3) providing services.
• (1) Identifying student needs using predictive analytics, by pulling together data from various sources (such as enrollment, assessments, LMS interactions, engagement with campus services and other touch-points) and flagging students who may be at risk of falling off track. Solutions in this category are partly differentiated by the types of data that drive their predictive engines.
• (2) Connecting students to services, facilitated either by building wider awareness and making resources available through a website or app, or nudging students to take action based on behavioural science.
• (3) Providing support services, such as mental health and wellness, accommodation, finance and legal, health and disability support, and extracurricular services.
• Cutting across these categories are more dynamic solutions making use of genAI and predictive analytics to help staff identify struggling students sooner so they can intervene earlier, to empower all students to take charge of their educational pathways, and to proactively identify leading indicators of risk and completion across student populations.

🌍 Key players

65 startups mapped

Student success and non-academic experience in HE market map, by Emerge Education.

Note: there are numerous providers in the student experience and success space and we can only include a sampling of both categories and providers here. Each subcategory is rich enough to merit its own map.

This market map includes tools that help instil a sense of belonging among students and support easy communication among students, faculty and administrators for mentorship, retention, and health and disability support. For example: Vygo is an engagement platform that connects students to older peers for peer support and tutoring services, to alumni for career advice and mentorship, and to staff for transparent and seamless student support services. ReUp uses AI to identify and engage at-risk students through a combination of automated and humanled communication to reduce and re-enrol students at risk of withdrawing. This category also includes tools that allow administrators to analyse engagement data and student feedback data to improve support services, such as Invoke Learning and Unitu. Students can use products such as Ida and n-Powered to get answers to student services questions on demand, and Caroami to mediate interpersonal conflicts in student accommodation.

This area is receiving lots of attention. In 2022, Ocelot raised $117M to increase engagement between universities and students. But partnerships are also proving a key strategy to scale impact. NewCampus announced late last year a strategic partnership with Open Campus, a community-led education protocol to build a decentralised campus. Prior to this, Anthology and Togetherall (formerly Big White Wall) joined forces to make Togetherall’s peer-to-peer mental health community available to all Anthology North America clients. Universities and colleges using Blackboard Learn can also choose to enable Togetherall through Blackboard Assist.

🔭 Who is getting ahead?

After initial development and trials in 2020–21, the Open University has integrated Taylor, an AI-based digital assistant designed to improve how disabled students provide information to the university and learn about support available. Taylor has been developed to allow students to disclose information in the form of a conversation, rather than submitting a form. As well as addressing a particular issue, Taylor is building up the OU’s general knowledge about the potential and challenges for using chatbots, virtual assistants and other AI technologies.

Middlesex University’s Fika ‘mental fitness’ project embeds wellbeing apps and programmes into the curriculum. A curriculum infusion approach aims to use specific academic disciplines to develop students’ understanding of mental wellbeing and related issues, integrating and embedding mental health and wellbeing resources into the curriculum that are relevant to the discipline — for example, links between mental wellbeing and biology, geography or the built environment. See a full case study in our report ‘Student and staff wellbeing in higher education’.

Unitu is an online platform that helps universities and students’ unions collect and analyse student feedback in real time to deliver faster improvements to the student experience. Following work that uncovered a need to make better use of informal feedback from students and close the feedback loop by demonstrating that student concerns are responded to, Swansea University rolled out Unitu in 2017–18. More than 14,000 students have access to the system and in that first year there were more than 70,000 interactions from the students. Run and self-moderated by the student representative community, who respond as well as provide updates on progress, and supported by both academics and professional staff, Unitu facilitates a transparent engagement process, allowing students to connect and share their views, and helping to support the learning community ethos. It creates an ideal platform for student reps to reach out and engage with their peers in a student-only environment, before moving topics into the university domain, enabling them to run campaigns to effect change in an engaged environment that they know the university is responsive to.

🔮 Predictions

• We have previously identified opportunities for AI tools that focus on student experience, especially mental wellbeing and social engagement. The greatest opportunity lies in the possibility of using AI tools seamlessly together to develop a holistic picture of each individual student’s journey — rather than ‘the student journey’. This enables greater personalisation and better planned interventions to adapt teaching and learning, and to support wellbeing.
• As genAI makes personalisation a real possibility, our understanding of the student body will become much more nuanced. We will need to develop a much more sensitive, detailed understanding of individual learner journeys in order to enable the maximum potential of tools to meet individual student circumstances and needs. For example, universities and edtech companies will need to appreciate the particular challenges student-workers face and acknowledge this within university pastoral support. This might mean incorporating solutions for the challenges students undertaking term-time, often precarious work face in a university’s duty of care to students and upskilling staff to understand challenges student-workers face and recognise how these may manifest in problematic student engagement behaviours (e.g. low attendance, tiredness in class, problems focussing, late submissions).
• As student demographics change, just-in-time support will give way to transformational, long-term relationships that are provider agnostic. Tech solutions tend to address immediate student needs through transactional relationships and “flash mentorships” — e.g. homework help, resume review and interview prep. Solutions that strive to build longer-term supportive relationships for students have historically tended to be delivered by non-profits, but higher education institutions think about mentorship as part of a constellation of supports they provide students to help them successfully navigate to, through and beyond university so startups will need to think more intentionally about the duration of their intervention along a lifelong student journey that will increasingly take in credit transfers and forms of employer-funded learning.
• We will see more differentiation by purchaser, not feature set. Platforms that target different phases of a student lifecycle have similar feature sets, so a platform could easily expand its focus to a different lifecycle phase. For example, a social networking platform for alumni could easily be deployed for current students, or vice versa. The main difference for the platform vendors is the sales target at the higher education institution.

🎯 Opportunities for startups

GenAI engines of opportunity for universities.

In this category, we see particular opportunities for AI-driven solutions that offer:

• AI-powered chat with your uni → Problem: Student support is always overwhelmed/lagging. Solution: A more human-like interface for students to interact with their institution and student support services through chatbot.

💎 Tips for founders

“The greatest challenges are in automating much routine interaction so that they are available whenever the student wants, without losing the ability to manage the student as an individual. The worrying thing is that most universities do not have a robust tech infrastructure that can integrate and provide a seamless service. Most of our tech partners are interested in the transaction and not about our successful implementation.

The quality of care that a higher education institution is able to offer to their students depends on positive and reliable use of technology, and we need to resolve some of the cultural issues between the HE world and edtech companies.”

Ian Dunn, provost, Coventry University and Emerge VP

• First, be clear about exactly where universities need help, because this is a strong indicator of where universities are looking for new startups to partner with. For example, this survey of university leaders identified areas where current products are not satisfying demand and need improvement: Mental health support → 55% have a service in place but want to improve it. Accessibility support & disability services → 52% have service in place but want to improve it. All interviewed administrators agreed these were priorities, particularly when it comes to making the university experience more accessible to all types of students (and especially those that have experienced great hurdles to do so historically).
• Consult and co-produce solutions with students — The mental health principle of ‘no decision about me without me’ should apply equally to the introduction and evaluation of digital support and services, whether apps or analytics.
• Categorise student-workers as a distinct student group needing dedicated support — when thinking about your users, establish processes for student-workers to share their distinct work-based needs, challenges and grievances. Students must know that their working lives matter to their university, and that they can report issues and get tailored support and advice aimed at alleviating stress arising from work pressures, as wel as equipping them with skills/training to address issues.
• Design for diversity — apps or platforms may not be designed in a way that is sensitive to a range of potential users. There could be assumptions built into the app, such as that the main user is an 18-year-old, which can change how the app communicates with the user — and who gets left out.
• Seek credibility on physical and mental health claims — A recent study by US and Australian academics found that only around one in 33 mental health apps had research to justify their claims of effectiveness. Just three in 10 claimed to have expert input in development, and only 20% were tied to a government body, academic institution or hospital. There is widespread scepticism that app designers may be driven by the wrong incentives: ultimately, they want to find ways to keep people using the app, despite the fact that excessive phone use has been linked to mental health problems. The use of data and analytics for wellbeing purposes also raises significant issues around privacy, transparency and consent, as well as other concerns. Apps that are selected to appear on the NHS Digital Apps Library, such as Togetherall and SilverCloud, have been assessed against a range of NHS standards and “adhere to key principles of privacy, security, interoperability, clinical safety, accessibility and inclusion”. Jisc has developed a code of practice for wellbeing and mental health analytics for education providers, so preempt these kinds of governance questions.

🔗 Read on

• ‘Enhancing student engagement using technological solutions’ (2022)
• ‘Student and staff wellbeing in higher education’ (2021)
• ‘Digital solutions for a smarter campus’ — Jisc/Emerge Education report on how tech can solve the biggest challenges facing HE leaders (2023)
• Edtech 20:20 vision: the top 40 emerging companies for higher education in 2023
• Part 1 in this series → ‘How startups can support universities with recruitment, applications and enrollment’

Read more news, views and research from the only fund backed by the world’s leading education entrepreneurs, in Emerge Edtech Insights.

📣 Call to action

We are now building our list of the top emerging edtech companies in HE in 2024.

👇 If you have seen an exciting company in this space, please tell us in the comments 👇

Our list analyses 100s of companies operating worldwide, using public and private data — it is crowdsourced, and voted on by our Higher Education edtech advisory board, led by Mary Curnock Cook.

Please share companies you think we should consider in comments 👇 and join us on 27 June to discover who has made the final list!

🙏 Thanks

At Emerge, we are on the look-out for companies (existing and new) that will shape the future of learning in higher education over the coming decade.

If you are a founder building a business addressing any of these challenges in HE, we want to hear from you. Our mission is to invest in and support these entrepreneurs right from the early stage.

So if you are looking for your first cheque funding do apply to us here: https://lnkd.in/eWi_9J5U . We look at everything as we believe in democratising access to funding (just as much as we believe in democratising access to education and skills).

Emerge is a community-powered seed fund home to practical guidance for founders building the future of learning and work. Since 2014, we have invested in more than 80 companies in the space, including Unibuddy, Cadmus, Engageli and Mentor Collective.

Emerge Education welcomes inquiries from new investors and founders. For more information, visit emerge.education or email hello@emerge.education, and sign up for our newsletter here.

Thank you for reading… I would hugely appreciate some claps 👏 and shares 🙌 so that others can find it!

Nic