higher-education
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The College Counselor Who Fired Her Business Model
Jessica Velasco meant to sell private college counseling. Then she decided the model was wrong for her - and built a free, searchable answer desk for families who could not afford the velvet-rope version.
Poly Reps puts a paycheck behind the campus welcome
Cal Poly’s student ambassadors spent decades introducing strangers to university life. Paying them changes who can afford to do the introducing.
The UCLA tour guide who used to be in the tour group
UCLA Engineering Ambassadors put current students in charge of the introduction. Between the buildings and the questions, prospective engineers get a glimpse of who they might become.
UCLA’s story starts before anyone presses send
Inside UCLA Strategic Communications, an animated research campaign and a carefully tested campus email belong to the same operation. The interesting part is how the university connects them.
They wanted a place at Berkeley. Then they wanted a department.
Central Americans for Empowerment began with the search for community. Its students have turned that search into history classes, public advocacy, and a campaign to give Central America a lasting academic home.
IE Design + Communications makes complexity worth a closer look
A Grammy invitation with a tape-pull trick. Five Cornell websites on one deadline. This California studio finds the human detail inside the institutional brief.
SOAS Students' Union Has a Bar to Run and a University to Challenge
Free advice, student politics and a place to spend the afternoon: SOAS Students' Union puts them under one roof. Its harder job is paying for the community while representing students to the university that helps fund it.
DIGITALENT’s bet: buy the schools, close the skills gap
A Spanish education group has brought business, law, coding and vocational schools under one roof. Its next test is teaching people to work with AI while keeping the classroom connected to the job.
Propel Center Is Getting HBCU Talent Into the Room
Apple and Southern Company put up $50 million to help connect HBCU students with industry. Propel’s real test is what students get to make, who sees it, and where that access takes them.
Two years in Tunis. The next chapter abroad.
Université Européenne de Tunis has built its pitch around a practical proposition: start locally, then continue through an international partner. Behind the globe-spanning brochure sits a campus with a mock courtroom, a trading lab and a hotel classroom that behaves like a hotel.
At SET University, the final assignment can be a company
The Kyiv university puts entrepreneurship inside the technical degree. Born just before Russia’s full-scale invasion, it is teaching Ukrainians to turn engineering expertise into products of their own.
Jadu and the 50p council enquiry
At Wigan, a highways enquiry went from £7 to 50p. Behind that small number is Jadu’s bigger business: connecting public websites to the people and systems that actually get things done.
Bulb wants your schoolwork to outlive your school email
The digital portfolio company turns class projects into evidence for college and work. Its toughest lesson: getting a school to buy software is only the beginning.
Kortext Put the Campus Bookshelf in the Cloud - Then Taught It to Read the Room
A Bournemouth bookseller’s digital bet became a piece of university infrastructure. Now Kortext wants the textbook, the library workflow and the warning light for a struggling student to live on one platform.
Mendeley Tried to Reinvent Research. Its Best Trick Was Fixing the Bibliography.
The London startup wanted to map the world’s scientific reading. Nineteen years, one controversial sale and several retired products later, Mendeley has learned that researchers mostly want their PDFs tidy and their citations correct.
Melissa Pippine Built a Marketing Career by Listening Before Speaking
Before she became Watermark’s chief marketing officer, Melissa Pippine spent years close to products, customers and the untidy systems between them. Her career makes a quiet argument: good marketing begins long before the campaign.
Kevin Rockmael Has Spent a Career Marketing the Thing Education Cannot Buy: Trust
Across Kaplan, Guild, Sounding Board and now Proctorio, the fractional CMO has kept returning to one difficult brief: make institutions more useful, more credible and more open to the people they routinely overlook.
Ashley Safranski Put Career Services at the Center of the Campus Story
After years of hearing families ask what college would lead to, Ashley Safranski built a career around helping institutions answer - with clearer stories, useful data, and career support students can actually find.
Ad Astra Found $500,000 Hiding in a College Timetable
A course schedule looks like clerical plumbing. Ad Astra argues it is where colleges quietly decide who graduates, which rooms sit empty and how much tuition slips away.
The Career Center Was Full of Answers. uConnect Found the Students Were Somewhere Else.
A nearly empty recruiting event exposed a problem hiding in plain sight: colleges had career resources, but students could not find them. uConnect built the distribution layer - and made engagement the product.
Jason Archer Keeps Building Places Where People Feel Known
He built an online graduate program around human connection. Now Baker Hill's chief marketing officer is applying the same instinct to the decidedly less sentimental machinery of lending technology.
Lumivero Bought the Boring Software Experts Refuse to Quit - Now It Has to Make the Bundle Add Up
Lumivero assembled a cabinet of stubbornly useful research and risk tools. Its next test is whether a collection of specialist products can behave like one decision system without sanding off what made each one trusted.
EverTrue Built a Machine for the 97% of Donors Most Fundraisers Ignore - Here’s What Advancement Teams Can Steal
Most institutions reserve personal attention for a sliver of their donor file. EverTrue’s bet is that better data, disciplined cadences, and a broader definition of a portfolio can make the neglected middle worth knowing.
John Fillmore Is Betting the Degree Needs a Workshop
After a decade helping Chegg scale, John Fillmore returned to the oldest problem in higher education: how to make a classroom feel more like the work waiting outside it.
Nikhil Sinha's Long Game: Turning Distance Into Infrastructure
A communication scholar became a university builder, an online-learning executive and a startup ecosystem operator. Across each reinvention, Nikhil Sinha has kept working on the same stubborn problem: how to give ambitious people access to the networks that make ambition useful.
Melvin Hines Built a Company Around the Students Higher Ed Forgets
Only 68 students from his high-school class of 250 reached graduation. Hines turned that number into a 13-year operating thesis: support should arrive before a student has to ask.
Justin Dagen Spent 15 Years Learning Why Doors Fail - Then He Made Them Read the Calendar
A pinball-playing software engineer found a stubborn campus problem hiding between two databases. The company he built to solve it now sits inside SwiftConnect, translating schedules into millions of quiet decisions at the door.
Mitch Gordon Put Freshman Year on a Passport
A teaching job in Taiwan became a career in global education. Now Verto Education's co-founder is trying to turn a semester abroad from an elective into the opening chapter of college.
Diego Fanara Turned a Lonely University Choice Into a Global Conversation
A teenager arrived in London with rankings, brochures and too few honest answers. Diego Fanara built Unibuddy so the next student could ask someone who had actually been there.
Carey Cook Took the Long Road to the High Road
After 28 years shaping student life, an Idaho educator traded the campus office for payroll, benefits and workers' comp - then merged his young company into a larger regional platform without giving up its local brief.