Guided Pathways

Tassel's Pathways solution helps the most underserved communities succeed in the most affordable educational path in the shortest possible time within their life constraints to durable careers.  Pathways is a community based solution providing students with an academic and career planning tools configured by faculty and academic counselors for the most efficient education plan to a college credential.  The community support services are embedded within the tool to provide students with ongoing real time support scaling advisors as students navigate through their academic careers.  When students reach work practicum requirements for their chosen program, career counselors and college employment specialists can then transition in to support the student journey on the Pathways product.  The Pathways tool was designed to increase the number of students the academic and career counselors can support through online collaboration capabilities instead of in person meetings.  Higher student engagement will translate to better student outcomes.

Pathways is designed to help inform students on which community college programs they would be most successful that also support their interest, abilities and career goals while creating a education plan that best aligns with their life situation.

Complete College America research found students who attend colleges part time drop out at a rate of over 30% in the first year.  This affects lower income students more because of an inability to attend college full time.  Shorter term programs or stackable certificates are potential solutions explored by community colleges to help students more quickly obtain obtain a credential in a field with good regional job growth.  Pathways help college administrators create these stackable certificate programs to help students organize their academic plans to provide more opportunities to complete a credential.

There are approximately 8 million community college students and over 50% of students are from low-middle to poverty level income backgrounds.  With on time completion rates at 22% or less, there are many students left behind from reaching the potential of good paying jobs in middle skill professions.  Community college career education programs provide career pathways to jobs paying above the national wage needed to support a family of 4.  

The Pathways is an web based solution that provides both academic planning with semester scheduling tools and  career exploration capabilities leveraging ONET data and regional company profiles.  The tools and capabilities were designed to work together in supporting guided pathways principles where students follow prescribed steps from career exploration to program selection and ongoing academic support.  The students find careers and companies for inspiration in their academic planning.  The roadmaps are configured on the platform by faculty and counselors to provide the clear roadmap of courses in the sequences that provide the most efficient path to graduation.

First generation students at community colleges represent 40% of the population.  They typically don't have many people in their social circles that can share information about careers and jobs in a meaningful way to influence academic choices.  Our solution supports the guided pathways work at the community colleges that lead students to intentionally identify and career objectives to use as the foundation of their educational planning.  The Pathways solution will be used in college success and career exploration courses offered in the counseling department of community colleges.  The college success courses are necessary courses for students enrolled in first year or EOPS programs.  The application feature set will help support the learning outcomes of those courses.

80% of the most vulnerable jobs that would be eliminated from the pandemic are low skill jobs.  Supporting community college career technical education programs help more people find affordable ways to obtain the education necessary to obtain a job with enough skills that provide a durable career.   

2 Full-time

4 Part-time

The founding team members of Tassel are all minorities and have attended the community college system in their academic careers.  We've lived the lives of the students we aim to serve.  Over time as our organization grows, we will be intentional about seeking community colleges graduates to add to our team.

College students have been served across their academic lifecycle by a large number of point solution applications purchased by colleges to support different functions.  Students see different tools for education planning, semester and course scheduling, career education, and professional community platforms.  Tassel combines the most critical elements of each of those applications but in support of guided pathways resulting in a cohesive student experience which guides a student through all phases of the education and career planning with supports added from counselors on the platform.   Pathways displaces both student success vendors and career education platforms.  The student success platforms like Hobsons, EAB and DegreeWorks function on just education planning and do not provide the career content to help students on the first step, finding their career goals before starting on the education planning step.  The career exploration tools like Roadtrip nation and EMSI Career coach are only focused on careers and indirectly map to college programs.  Pathways provides only the key elements from each area to support the single student experience of finding and following a guided pathway.

The Pathways solution is a web based application that is deployed on a cloud infrastructure.  It is designed to be a white label product to personalize for each college and their specific program content.  The application is built using modern web technologies like React, javascript and supported by a relational database.  The basic capabilities to support personalized user experiences like user profiles and separate logins are on the platform.

Pathways has completed 2 pilots at California community colleges and are now under contract to roll out to students in the spring of 2021.  The configuration of the content in the platform was tested by faculty and counselors at 1 of our college customers.

Our long term goals are to improve the employment outcomes of students and reducing the time to graduation.  We will do this by providing a channel for faculty and counselors as they redesign their programs with more of an equity lens.  

Guided pathways is the movement in community colleges driving that change from the faculty and administration

Our goals within the next year is to launch Pathways to students at 6 community college institutions.  This will give us access to about 100,000 students to help with the academic planning.  Over the next 5 years, we've modeled reaching 200 community college students to serve 1.2 million students.

The community college software market is traditionally slow.  There may be a necessary investment in business development functions to allow following through on long procurement cycles across many prospects to close the accounts.

Our solution will be the first in the market to support a college student from selection of a program to job placement.  This is a solution 6 college presidents have expressed to our team in a panel we hosted as a need that's not been available in the higher education software market.

Our solution supports the entire student lifecycle from admission to job placement.  We will track completions and job placements for our college customers.

Our co-founding team of myself and CTO Jason has worked together for 4 years at Successfactors, the top talent management software company, where we worked in the product development team to build solutions for new types of employee communities to compete with top enterprise community types of offerings.  We are both attendees of the community college systems in our path to bachelors degrees and were both first gen college students.

In our time working together to provide solutions to help mid career professionals with career planning, we learned many lessons about how to best engage users through community.  For community based solutions to succeed, they needed to be tied to critical or frequent business processes in order to maintain the engagement of users.  We find the area around student success and support has the attributes to replicate an engaging community, processes that are currently supported by in-person meetings.

We've designed and built the Pathways solution with 2 paid college partners in developing this new platform to  support the major reform work undergoing in the California community college system, Guided Pathways.  The Guided Pathways movement in California is supported by a $150 million dollar grant from the state over the next 5 years for all 114 community colleges to participate in the reform work with the end goal being a solution that provides a student experience with clear pathways to careers or transfers to 4 year institutions. 

This reform work has the benefit of engaging the entire faculty in the institution to take a fresh look at how they design curriculum and support systems around the programs to support students to career or transfer outcomes.  It gives us the ability to introduce a new innovation to this market to support this work at first and eventually replace many of the ineffective student success and career job board solutions that are used today.  

The Pathways application is sold to each college as an annual subscription.  The application is delivered through a web browser and supported by a cloud based infrastructure.

We sell software subscriptions to colleges.  The gross margin on the software is over 80% and it will take 6 colleges to become cash flow break even and provide the necessary support service levels.

Tassel has signed $128,000 in contracts for 2020 service and raised an additional $120,000 from investors to support 18 month run rate at existing operational levels.

No plans to raise money at this time.

Our estimated expenses for 2021 $150,000 for salaries and $20,000 for operational expenses.

Middle-skill careers have been overlooked for many years as students have attempted to pursue more traditional college pathways to careers.   Middle skill programs are typically available in the community colleges through the Career Technical Education departments and are shorter in duration to complete.  This makes it more possible for student to reach good paying jobs in 2 years or less if they had more awareness of these career paths.

We are introducing a new solution designed to support a major transformation ongoing in the community colleges, guided pathways.  The solution needs engagement not only from faculty and counselors, but also local employers and workforce development to help ensure the placements are achieved for students entering these programs.

Community college serve as a central hub of collaboration between workforce development and regional employers.  Overlapping initiatives can slow down our ability to present our product as a solution to bring all these constituents together to serve the student in one platform.

We'd like to partner with Workforce Boards to help us distribute our application to more community colleges to help build the library of programs and local employer profiles so students can see more options for the career outcomes.