student-success
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Lisa Ryerson Is Teaching a University to Listen
A first-generation college student became a middle-school teacher, then learned to lead at two very different scales. At SNHU, Lisa Marsh Ryerson is betting that a university with more than 200,000 learners can still hear one voice at a time.
Patrick Garayta Is Betting That College’s Missing Infrastructure Is a Relationship
After two decades selling the machinery of education, Patrick Garayta has taken charge of a company built around something stubbornly human: making sure a student has someone to ask.
Alex Pritchett and the $600 Yes That Became Upswing
Before the funding rounds and hundreds of thousands of students, there was a spare room, a fragile nine-dollar web host and one small contract. Alex Pritchett helped turn that precarious beginning into a durable student-support company.
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.
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.
Katie Fang
Katie Fang is the founder and CEO of SchooLinks, an Austin-based education technology company whose college and career readiness platform serves millions of K-12 students across U.S. school districts. Born in Shanghai and educated across four countries, she taught herself to code and built the first version of the product with $5,000 in savings, then grew it from a student-facing app into an enterprise SaaS platform that school districts use to track and improve student outcomes. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education, she has taken SchooLinks onto the Inc. 5000 list three years running and raised roughly $90 million in venture funding through a 2024 Series B.
Megan Dusenbery
Megan Dusenbery is the Chief Executive Officer of Knack, a student success platform that helps colleges run paid peer tutoring programs. Appointed in October 2025 alongside the company's Series B led by New Markets Venture Partners, she succeeded founder Samyr Qureshi, who moved to executive chairman. She spent nearly two decades building higher-ed partnerships at Kaplan (rising to Senior Vice President of Higher Education) and at ACUE, where she was Chief Partnerships Officer before taking the Knack job.
Miguel Cosculluela
Miguel Molina Cosculluela is the founder and CEO of Analytikus, a Miami-based EdTech company that uses learning analytics and AI to help colleges and universities boost student success, retention and personalized teaching. A self-described analytics evangelist with 12+ years in the field, he co-founded a Startup Weekend winner in Geneva, has appeared on CNN to talk advanced analytics, and hosts the bilingual podcast Simplifying Analytics. He is also an Ironman 70.3 finisher and genealogy aficionado.
Sabih Wasi
Sabih Bin Wasi is the Founder and CEO of Stellic, a degree management platform born from a personal spreadsheet he built as a confused freshman at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. Growing up in Karachi as the son of a teacher and a civil engineer, he came to CMU-Q with transfer credits, a head full of course prerequisites, and a stubborn conviction that the system could be better. He co-founded Stellic with his wife Rukhsar Neyaz and fellow CMU-Q alum Musab Popatia, turning a student project into enterprise software now used by 80+ universities and over one million students. Stellic has raised $14.1 million in total funding, earned a Forbes 30 Under 30 Education nod in 2019, received a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant, and has never lost a university partner in five years of operation.