Stellic, a student-centered technology solution provider in higher education, has been awarded a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) to identify, explore, and document innovative and scalable strategies for addressing the most common and pernicious advising technology challenges that can impact the ability of institutions to deliver high-quality advising and student support experiences.

This investment will support Stellic in the co-development of new approaches and solutions with Wright State University and CUNY Lehman College to address integration challenges around degree progress and tracking. The demonstration project will focus on increasing postsecondary attainment rates and closing opportunity gaps specifically for Black, Latino, and Indigenous students, and students from low-income backgrounds.

"This is an exciting initiative that has the potential for technology integration in ways that would advance our commitment to educational attainment and social mobility in the Bronx and New York. We are delighted that we were selected by Stellic and the Gates Foundation to be part of this unique demonstration initiative." - Peter Nwosu, Provost & Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs & Student Success, Lehman College

Current data and system interoperability gaps create a number of obstacles for students and advisors today. The lack of integration within degree progress, audit, planning, tracking and scheduling tools also creates constraints for back-end administrators in addressing these obstacles. Collaborating with Wright State and Lehman, Stellic will work to better understand how these challenges affect persistence and completion and ultimately identify opportunities to reimagine, modernize, simplify, and better integrate the systems that deliver these services to students and advisors.

"Certainly, from the academic advising perspective, we’re always really good at taking a look back at what students are doing. However, we now want integrated systems that look forward, prepare, and predict. So I’m really looking forward to this project and how it will help us to do all of that." - Tim Littell, Associate Vice Provost for Student Success, Wright State University

The project will employ a Targeted Universalist approach, which focuses on deeply understanding, addressing challenges, and designing for marginal group members, which may yield benefits to serve the broader group. It will include on-site student and advisor interviews to understand key pain points, experience mapping, applied research and analysis of data, identifying requirements and ideal design, followed by feedback from students, advisors and staff.

The project will culminate in a final analysis, white paper and dissemination of findings that are planned to be released in the winter of 2022, with the goal of providing a repeatable blueprint for other institutions on leveraging advanced technology to overcome current anti-integration policies, increase postsecondary attainment rates and ensure ensuring that race, ethnicity, and income are not predictors of postsecondary success.