Model and Strategy
Hands-on support is critical to ensuring that students from low-income communities persist past the difficult first years of college. The Beyond 12 College Success Coaching Program provides this support by matching college-bound high school seniors with full-time, virtual college coaches during their first two years of college. Beyond 12 is currently coaching 2,000+ students on 180 college campuses.
Beyond 12 is seeking to scale its impact by integrating its human coaches with a 2.0 version of its MyCoach mobile app to serve 100,000 students annually by 2021. Beyond 12 will work with human-centered design firm, IDEO, to continue to design, pilot, and implement its new coaching model with approximately 200 students, and begin the research and design of its artificial intelligence (AI) analytics tool.
Ultimately, this project will allow Beyond 12 to ensure that ALL students have the opportunity to earn a college degree that allows them to excel in a global, technology-driven economy.
Impact
Beyond 12’s vision is that one day, ALL students will have the opportunity to earn a college degree that allows them to provide for their families, contribute to society, and break the cycle of poverty for the next generation. By collecting and sharing longitudinal data that crosses K12, higher education, and the workforce, Beyond 12 not only provides students with differentiated coaching that ensures they earn a college degree, but also provides actionable feedback to high schools about their college preparatory efforts, informs the retention work of colleges and universities, and influences the national conversation about student success.
To track progress toward this goal, Beyond 12 measures annual college persistence and graduation rates for the students it serves. A recent analysis of data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), a national repository of college enrollment data provided by colleges, revealed that the students Beyond 12 serves are persisting and attaining degrees at levels that dramatically surpass comparable cohorts of students. Of the 120 students coached by Beyond 12 who graduated from high school and entered college in the fall of 2012, 88% earned a college degree or were still enrolled in college 4 years after entering (53% have earned a college degree and 35% are still enrolled in college). According to a 2015 NSC Research Center report, among students from low-income and high-minority high schools, only 22% earned a degree within 6 years of entering college.
Leadership
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Alexandra Bernadotte
Founder