Episode 77: Melvin Hines on Combining AI and People to Support Students
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How can you combine people and an AI-powered virtual assistant to provide wraparound student support? How can you do this in way that makes things easier for the staff and faculty supporting students rather than adding more platforms and passwords? What are the right student success measures for institutions and how to you tie detailed data to the big picture? We dive into these and other questions with Melvin Hines, co-founder and CEO of Upswing.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of higher education, the traditional "just-in-case" model of student support—where resources are dumped on students during a frantic orientation week and rarely revisited—is failing. Today’s students are juggling more than ever, and the barriers to graduation often have nothing to do with what happens inside the classroom.
Melvin Hines, co-founder of Upswing, joined the Connected College Podcast to discuss a more proactive approach. By leveraging AI-powered virtual assistants and "wraparound" services, colleges can meet students exactly where they are, providing the right resource at the right time.
Defining the "Wraparound" Approach to Student Success
Student success is traditionally measured by graduation rates, but Hines argues we must look deeper at the "uplift" provided to families and communities. Surprisingly, only 16% of students who drop out cite academic difficulty as the primary reason. The vast majority are forced out by life: financial distress, mental health challenges, childcare needs, and food or housing insecurity.
Wraparound services address the "whole student." This means integrating academic tutoring and advising with basic needs support and mental health resources. When a student is struggling to find a meal or a place to sleep, a 3.0 GPA won't keep them in school unless the institution can provide a bridge to stability.
The Power of Proactive Nudges and AI
One of the biggest hurdles for students—especially first-generation or non-traditional learners—is knowing where to start. Many students are hesitant to "raise their hand" for help. This is where AI, like Upswing’s virtual assistant Ana, changes the game.
Instead of waiting for a crisis, the system uses "gentle nudges." By texting a student to ask how they are feeling about upcoming midterms or reminding them of graduation application deadlines, the technology creates a low-friction feedback loop. This "just-in-time" support ensures that help arrives when the student is most receptive to it, rather than weeks after they’ve already decided to quit.
Data-Driven Insights and the "Network Effect"
Beyond individual student support, aggregating data across multiple institutions allows for a "network effect." For example, data might reveal that students at certain types of institutions are 50% more likely to indicate potential self-harm. By surfacing these trends early, administrators can implement proactive interventions before a campus-wide crisis occurs.
Furthermore, these insights help "bust silos" within an institution. When data from tutoring, financial aid, and mental health services are brought together, leaders can see a holistic picture of student risk and institutional performance.
Fighting Administrative Debt with "Heroes"
A common pitfall in EdTech is creating "administrative debt"—adding yet another dashboard for overworked staff to manage. To combat this, Hines emphasizes the importance of human partnership. Upswing utilizes "Higher Education Retention Officers" (HEROs) who meet with college partners monthly to walk them through the data and action plans.
By simplifying the tech experience for staff, the technology actually frees up human advisors to focus on the "thorny" problems that require a personal touch, while the AI handles the routine questions and referrals.
Adapting to the "Great Awkward" and Beyond
As we navigate the post-COVID era, colleges are seeing a rise in students who lack certain social or "soft" skills. These students may be less likely to email a professor or visit a career center. The path forward requires institutions to be more proactive than ever, meeting students in their preferred communication channels (like SMS) and providing "just-in-time" learning for career development and life skills.
Ultimately, the goal is to create a "connected college" where no student suffers in silence and every hurdle is met with a timely, supportive hand.
Episode 77 Transcript
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Melvin Hines: a lesson that I would share with others who are in the EdTech spaces that you can design the prettiest best, most, easiest to use admin dashboards and platforms but. For that administrator, it's just one of 20, right? And so they're likely not gonna log in, they're not gonna use your password and remember all those things all over again to figure out how to add this to their complicated lives. And so what can you do to simplify that on behalf of them?
Elliot Felix: That was Melvin Hines, co-founder of the company, upswing, that works with colleges and universities to offer wraparound student support services through things like their AI powered virtual assistant. Anna, we had a fascinating conversation about the parallels between staff who are often overwhelmed by all the different technology platforms, just like the students they're trying to support on them. We also talked about the powerful combination of AI and technology with human support. We touched on how critical it is to bring the data together to see the big picture and understand how you compare to other institutions and how this is where an ed tech partner can create a network effect of sorts. I think you're really gonna enjoy it. Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. And if you're a leader in higher ed, and you think that the silos and separations get in the way of student success, then this podcast and my upcoming book, The Connected College, are for you. We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community. Their coursework and their careers. Welcome, Melvin. I'm so excited to hear about wraparound student services and the role that AI is gonna, is playing and is gonna play in that.
Melvin Hines: Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.
Elliot Felix: I think a good way to get started is to hear how you did, how did you get involved in higher ed and how'd that lead you to found upswing?
Melvin Hines: So I started upswing back in 2013. We actually just celebrated our 12th year anniversary. I originally got involved in just the idea of trying to help support students from different backgrounds from my own experience growing up in South Georgia where we just didn't always have a lot of those resources that, you tend to have in some of the larger cities. I grew up in a small town and and so out of 250 students in my high school, there were only 68 of us that graduated. I went onto the University of Georgia and it was a really big deal. In my hometown. It was written up in the newspaper, all that good stuff. But when I got there, I think I saw where, let's say the other half lives, where people had, SAT and a CT prep, they had all these programs, they had AP courses, all these things that just gave them a bit of a leg up. That I realized I was definitely behind on. And so that really led me to create an experience where no matter where you live where you're born, where you grow up that you can have that same opportunity to also advance in life as everyone else.
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Elliot Felix: We're talking about wraparound student support services. They're a means to an end and the end is student success. I would love to hear how you define that.
Melvin Hines: The way I think about student success is of course we start from the ultimate end result, which is people being able to, find a job, get a career uplift their families. That's the thing that I felt was missing in a lot of cases from my hometown, where we did see so many students not necessarily make it to graduation of high school let alone. Going to college or getting other types of career pathways. So that's the ultimate goal that's there. So then the question becomes, okay, what does it look like to be successful? In order for us to get them to that point, what we know is that we need them to be able to graduate and we need them to be able to be prepared for what's next in life. If we can do those two things well. Then we can help to change an entire generation of students. And so to us, when we're looking at the metrics, it is about how quickly are we making those changes and how effectively are we making those changes?
Melvin Hines: We really we looked at a study actually just recently from one of our HBCUs here in North Carolina where they found that. Time to graduation for upswing users was actually shrunk by a semester for undergraduate students and by a full year for graduate students. To them, that was the most important metric for student success because what they found was that the more drawn out their students are in school, the less likely it is that they will ever graduate. And those are the types of things that we tend to focus on as our internal metrics to determining whether or not we're actually helping student success.
Melvin Hines: In the end, what they ended up finding out was that Ana helped to increase their graduation rate by 8%. So that's just one of the myriad of things that could be milestones and hurdles for students to, to get to where, they are ultimately. Having that diploma in hand and ready for the next phase of their lives.
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Elliot Felix: give us a picture of what wraparound student services are and how they work.
Melvin Hines: I think that a lot of times people will tend to think that in order to serve a student what we really need to do is focus on helping provide supplemental academic support. Usually tutoring or advising, but it turns out that when you take a look at the data on which students are dropping out and why? Only 16% of students say that academics was the reason why they dropped out. There was a study that was done by a co-founder friend of mine's company that showed that the average student dropout has a 3.0 GPA or higher. And so the question becomes, then why are they dropping out?
Melvin Hines: You can really start to look at a whole host of reasons that are sometimes growing, sometimes shrinking, but really it comes down to a few key areas. The first one is financial distress. So perhaps they lost a job, perhaps their spouse lost a job. Perhaps they're struggling with making ends meet. Education is just one of those things that they're much more willing to part with than some of the other pieces that are there. We know that since COVID Mental Health has been an increasing issue. Basic need support, I think one of the big stats that surprises people is that one in every six college students will be homeless at some point during their college experience. Food insecurity being a big issue as well, childcare these are all the things that are going to prevent that student from being able to focus on and think about class. And so what we wanted to do was create a tool. A platform, if you will, that would bring all those different resources together into one place and create Anna, our virtual assistant, as a means to be able to connect that student to that right resource at that right time.
Elliot Felix: I love the virtual assistant to be able to do the gentle nudges. The response you're gonna get in that moment is gonna be so different than when someone sits down to take a 10 minute student experience survey. I love the timeliness. I love the proactivity. I love you were an early adopter of AI in, in terms of driving these kinds of nudges and responses and connecting students to resources.
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Elliot Felix: How are these wraparound services changing? And how can institutions adapt? You've talked about mental health and the rise of mental health, financial distress, basic needs. What are some of the big changes you're seeing in terms of how we support students holistically, and what advice do you have for institutions to adapt to those changes?
Melvin Hines: So I would say there are two key things that we've certainly seen. The first is just the increase in number of non-traditional students. When we first started upswing, I think the idea was, wow, that's such a small demographic. And today they're the majority, the largest majority of all students that are going to college. They have a set of needs that are completely different and unique and a lot of times, schools are unprepared for them. For example, childcare challenges. Students who aren't coming to class because they don't have a childcare provider.
Melvin Hines: Second challenge has been I think, a lot of the students who are more of the quote unquote traditional age came up during a time period that was COVID, so there's less let's call them soft skills or social skills. And those become challenges for those students. We're still in the middle of the great awkward. They're less likely to talk to their professor. If they are having challenges in class, they're less likely to write formal emails. They're a lot more colloquial in nature. And they're less prepared for interviews and and to submit resumes and those types of things. And we're seeing an adjustment in terms of some of those wraparound services needs because we're having to help to, in a very short period of time, close the gap that's been created over the last four or five years because of COVID and that in and itself is a challenge for a lot of our colleges because they're not getting additional personnel.
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Elliot Felix: How can institutions adapt?
Melvin Hines: This would probably be a lesson that I would share with others who are in the EdTech spaces that you can design the prettiest best, most, easiest to use admin dashboards and platforms that you wanna do, but for that administrator, it's just one of 20, right? And so they're likely not gonna log in, they're not gonna use your password and remember all those things all over again to figure out how to add this to their complicated lives. And so what can you do to simplify that on behalf of them?
Melvin Hines: So part of what we do is we have our hero program where we meet with every single one of our partners at least once a month, and we show them what we're seeing through their dashboard. If they ever wanna log in and see more of it, it's available to them, but we will actually walk them through what we're noticing and talk about plans of action that we can implement in order to ensure that their students are continuing to ultimately get to that finish line.
Elliot Felix: I think what you're describing is almost like an administrative debt that you can unknowingly create for your clients. It sounds like what you've done is you've made it you've tailored it for institutions where there's not a lot of spare time and you're making it easy for them, which I think is so smart.
Melvin Hines: Whether you're an administrator who is serving one of these students, or whether you are a founder serving one of the administrators, it's incumbent upon you to be in front of that user or that student as much as you can to lower the friction, to hear what those needs are, and to be able to solve for those needs as quickly as possible. That's how you ensure that they stay happy, that they continue to use you, and that they continue to get to where you want them to get to. At the end of the day, it does require a human experience. And that's a big part of why, what we try to do with our virtual assistant, Anna, is to surface the needs to solve for the quick questions, but then to be able to pass along to those people the big challenges that really do require that human intervention.