Company: Upswing is a technology company founded on the premise that access to educational support services should be universal and free. By partnering with educational institutions, the company provides students, staff, and admins with a modern student services experience that results in more students attaining a degree.
HQ Location & Year Founded: Austin, 2013
CEO: Melvin Hines, Co-founder and CEO, has been leading the company since inception and was previously a researcher, consultant, and law professor at North Carolina Central University School of Law. He is a graduate of the University of Georgia and holds both a JD and MBA degree from Duke University.
Funds Raised and VC Investors: $9 million from Agave Fund, Charlotte Angel Fund, ECMC Foundation, Imaginable Futures, Impact America Fund, JP Morgan, Lumina Foundation, NC Idea, Rethink Education, Silicon Valley Growth Syndicate, Stanford GSB Impact Fund, Strada Education Network, SustainVC, Tech Wildcatters, Village Capital
Where did the idea for Upswing originate?
Upswing was born out of my personal experiences. I grew up in South Georgia. We did not have a lot of educational support or innovation in smaller towns as you have in larger cities. My high school class started out as 250 students, but there were only 68 of us who ultimately graduated. There were few people to whom you could go to talk about college admissions, career paths, etc. As a high school kid, I didn’t have much perspective on higher education. I went to the University of Georgia (UGA), which was a big deal for my hometown. However, I later found out that it was more like a fallback school for many other kids who had been raised to see the whole world as an opportunity. I saw a big gap between my hometown compared to UGA and Atlanta.
I started thinking about how to level the playing field. I began tutoring and mentoring around the Athens, Georgia area. This led me to decide to go to Duke University and pursue education equality at the law school. Over there, I connected to the Dean of North Caroline Central University, a local HBCU. We created a success program for students that I taught part-time for three years. I wanted to create something that could better scale this, so I met to discuss this with friends and colleagues. We had an idea to create a platform to allow kids from rural areas to benefit from the same knowledge about education and career paths that kids from the cities enjoy.
What is the key problem that Upswing intends to solve?
The college experience was built for traditional 18–22-year-olds. However, now most students are experienced and adult learners, including veterans, who stopped at some point and want to get reskilled. College hasn’t been built for them. As a result, there are different types of friction. Online education doesn’t serve everyone, particularly if it doesn’t come with office hours, tutoring, and other features of traditional in-person learning. We created a platform with Upswing that allows for all campus student resources to join in one place. It has scheduling capabilities, personal advisors available through the phone, and a Zoom-like classroom experience. We make it easy for students to route to the right place.
How are you most differentiated as a service?
We don’t see many services like this, and we are crafting a category that didn’t exist beforehand. Online tutors have been available, but that was about it. With the pandemic, Zoom became biggest competitor. However, Zoom has no scheduling ability and was not built for education delivery. We are trying to educate the world on needs of non-traditional students. It is not just a niche group, but a dominant and growing part of market.
What are the company’s key accomplishments to date?
We support nearly one million students per year. We have helped prevent over 50,000 students from dropping out of school. Moreover, we have been able to move the needle on retention rates for colleges by almost two percentage points. That equates to 150 students for a 5,000-student campus. That’s a lot of impact. Our work backed by the Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, Stanford University, others. Today we have over 70 education institution partners and hope to end the year with close to 90.
What lies ahead in the plans for Upswing?
It is crucial for us to impact more students. We started to look at reasons why students drop out and discovered that less than 10% drop out for academic reasons. We plan to tackle major factors that people have for dropping out of school and will do so by partnering with some of greatest organizations. Our hope it to create a platform that can serve every college and university across the country.
Ron’s Take
Educational inequality takes many forms. It is rampant at all levels of the education journey and is deeply entrenched in American history and society. Sadly, many of the barriers that linger are rooted in simple lack of well disseminated information, communication, and distribution of resources. The Upswing platform is helping to unlock the potential of individuals who may not have been exposed to the same opportunities for education or who may have chosen a different path and ultimately decided to return to formal higher education. Even as an early-stage endeavor, Upswing has already had a demonstrable impact for the population that it has served and is limited only by the willingness of partners to embrace its platform and mission.