The Advisory Board Company announced its second acquisition in less than a day on Thursday, scooping up Alabama-based startup GradesFirst after first securing D.C.-based Clinovations Wednesday night.
GradesFirst will serve as the first one-stop student success solution for ABC's flagship Education Advisory Board technology membership, the Student Success Collaborative. EAB is the higher education division of ABC.
The acquisition of GradesFirst will allow EAB to enable colleges and universities to turn data into new projects by pairing predictive insights with a case management and communication network. This is expected to expand the reach and impact of the Student Success Collaborative's predictive analytics.
"This acquisition provides us with the opportunity to more comprehensively address one of our member's toughest challenges – increasing persistence and graduation rates – and improve the lives of the more than one billion students with whom we interact each year," said Chairman and CEO of ABC Robert Musslewhite in a statement. "We are now incredibly well positioned to serve postsecondary learners across the student lifecycle – from finding the best-fit school and graduating on time to securing employment shortly thereafter and staying engaged as active alumni and lifelong learners."
GradesFirst is well-known for helping schools engage and support at-risk students. Hopes are that the company's tools used to connect campus services in a cloud-based platform will further EAB's mission to aid in solving the most pressing problem on the campuses of colleges and universities nationwide.
"We couldn't be more excited to join the EAB family and partner with a company that shares our mission of serving students by maximizing the impact of academic advising," said Mario Moore, CEO of GradesFirst, in a statement. "By leveraging the full strength of EAB's predictive analytics, we will enhance how campuses engage with at-risk populations, and help more students stay on a path to success."
According to ABC, this is the first platform that advisors and other students support systems can use to predict which students are at risk and connect them to the resources they need using a seamless student support network. They can then go one step further to evaluate the effectiveness of those interactions. Now schools will be able to see which resources they're spending their scarce budgets on are actually helping students get back on the course to success.
