BestFit

BestFit is the Tinder/Snapchat of college discovery: we empower underrepresented students in the college-search process while improving college recruiting.

Social capital is a critical resource in college decision-making, and students with college-educated parents and mentors are more likely to apply, attend, and graduate from college. These social and informational inequities lead millions of low-income, minority, and first-generation (LIMFG) students to enroll in colleges that don’t match their abilities and aspirations. Consequently, 75% of these students won’t graduate--missing out on the income, health, and societal benefits of a college degree. Their failure to complete has a tremendous impact on universities too, costing $20 billion annually.

To solve this two-sided problem, BestFit uses machine learning and video-based narratives to personalize the college search process for underrepresented students, supplement existing initiatives of high school counselors and college access programs, and improve recruiting for colleges. We’re a web and mobile platform that matches high school students (users) to their best-fit colleges and universities (customers). Free for students, BestFit provides personalized content, helps analyze “fit,” and facilitates next steps. We connect with students where they already are, using video-based, near-peer interactions that are as natural to them as Instagram and Snapchat. Content is primarily created by current college students (work-study employees) who provide authentic stories of college life, its challenges, and insider advice. As users browse recommended posts, they can engage with schools by following their profiles, liking/saving their content, inquiring to receive more information, and navigating to their application. These features make it easy to manage the schools they’re interested in and create a seamless search process across time and technological devices.
Our customers are colleges/universities looking to engage with students, personalize their messaging, and track student progression through the recruiting pipeline. BestFit consolidates and scales colleges’ recruiting efforts--enabling them to reduce costs, expand their outreach, and meet their enrollment goals.

BestFit disrupts the status quo by combining technological innovation with culturally relevant pedagogies:

• We use technology to democratize access to social capital. Decades of research illustrate the efficacy of weak social ties (acquaintances, advisors, etc.) in generating new information, opportunities, and broader world-views (Granovetter, 1973; Penard & Poussing, 2010; Putnam, 2000). However, alternative tools remain hyperfocused on disseminating objective data and using A.I. to eliminate human intervention. BestFit uses a two-fold strategy to increase students’ social capital. Near-peer advisors facilitate information and emotional sharing, as well as reinforcement of identity. Simultaneously, our algorithms create a peripheral network of similar users that encourages students to explore new schools.

• We take a nuanced approach to college recommendations. Alternative apps tend to rely on explicit factors (i.e., self-reported preferences) to narrow down students' search results. BestFit utilizes both implicit (i.e., views, likes, follows) and explicit factors to generate recommendations and facilitate college discovery.

Our ability to analyze and improve student success and outcomes from high school to post-graduation is valuable for any student, high school, or college/university around the world. By helping both users and customers achieve their goals, BestFit increases the number of LIMFG students who apply to, attend, and stay in their best-fit college--inducing the individual and societal benefits that come with a diverse and inclusive college community.

BestFit is revolutionizing the way students and colleges find one another by using technology to incorporate nuance into college-search and democratize access to social capital. We employ machine learning to recommend colleges outside of students’ immediate networks that are still an academic, social, and financial fit. Our platform allows us to scale existing initiatives such as in-person mentoring and campus tours: these efforts are effective but are labor-intensive and have limited reach. By scaling and capturing the value of human interactions through technology, we provide students better, more nuanced information to help them identify their best-fit colleges--improving persistence and graduation.

Our decision to build BestFit as web and mobile applications is rooted in the fact that low-income, first-generation, and/or underrepresented students are more likely to be dependent on smartphones or public places for Internet. Machine learning is also a key element of how we match students to schools: using collaborative filtering techniques, we create peripheral networks of similar users that encourages students to explore new schools outside of their networks. Then, we use national and institutional data to assess fit--analyzing a student’s true cost of attending, outcomes of similar students, and each college’s ability to support their success.

We aim to validate our solution through an NYC-wide pilot conducted alongside the upcoming admissions cycle. We target an MVP launch by August 2018 to track high school student engagement and retention on the platform--this is essential to validating that BestFit engages students more effectively in the college-search process relative to existing tools. By January 2019, we’ll be able to validate whether BestFit can effectively convert students from prospects to applicants. At the same time, we target an alpha launch in early 2019, incorporating more advanced machine learning features. We aim to secure our first paying customers by summer 2019.

Over the next five years, we aim to expand BestFit’s user base from students in the New York metropolitan area to high school students around the US, nontraditional students in the US, international students, and prospective graduate students. We also plan to partner with a wide range of national and international universities to increase our efficacy. As our platform becomes better at assessing fit and predicting outcomes, we will extend BestFit’s services past the search and apply process to other areas of the college pipeline (enrollment, retention, transfer, graduation, career outcomes, graduate school), increasing our impact in the education world.

BestFit is 100% free for end-users and will be available on web, Android, and iOS. We reach our users through three key channels: 1) institutional partners such as high schools and community-based organizations, 2) social media, and 3) word of mouth. The communities we serve are important to us, which is why we partner with high school counselors, high school districts, and organizations that serve a significant proportion of low-income, first-generation, and/or students of color. BestFit’s intuitive design requires minimal onboarding and enables these partners to easily incorporate the platform into existing college mentoring programs, saving time and money.

Although we won’t launch our MVP until August 2018, we have secured verbal commitments from partners (high schools and community-based organizations in the New York metropolitan area) with a combined pool of more than 2000 high school students. They will interact with BestFit by browsing the web platform or downloading the app, and will be able to view and engage with college-related information and advice from current college students. Since this is our first cohort, our users’ in-app use will be supplemented by in-person panels and gatherings to build a community of BestFit users and mentors.  

We target 10,000 active users in 12 months and 50,000 in 3 years. Our users are 9-12th graders with college-going abilities and aspirations, but lack the social and financial capital needed to navigate the process. BestFit optimizes their search and decision-making processes by recommending a range of best fit colleges, showing what success looks like, how to get there, and challenges along the way. By increasing students’ engagement, knowledge of, and sense of belonging in higher education, BestFit empowers students to identify colleges that support their success, leading to higher application, enrollment, and retention rates among underrepresented students.

As researchers and women of color, we made it our mission to understand the systemic inequities that plague higher education and make low-income, underrepresented, and first-generation students least likely to earn college degrees. Our experience in higher education, finance, and software development enables us to solve this problem in a revolutionary way, while understanding what it takes to build an effective team and product. In six months, we’ve taken BestFit from a winning idea to an incorporated company that was named fellows at 4.0 Schools and winners of  NYU’s Algorithm for Change (supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).

We are a for-profit social enterprise, and generate revenue through annual subscriptions from colleges and universities. Our subscriptions are priced at $40,000-50,000 a year based on institution size and enable colleges and universities to identify new prospects, track student engagement, receive proprietary market insights, and more effectively convert students from inquiries to applicants. We are currently exploring revenue sharing agreements or advertising revenue from third-party service providers as an additional revenue stream. Given our emphasis on social impact, we want to first ensure potential partners have a track record of successfully helping low-income, first-generation, and historically underrepresented minorities achieve their educational and financial goals.

Once we reach a critical mass of users, customers, and historical data, we are well-positioned to expand into other segments of the student success pipeline (retention, graduation, transfer, career outcomes) as well as international markets, diversifying our revenue stream and increasing user and customer lifetime value in the long-term.

Early on we were fortunate enough to find mentors with experience in education and technology. These relationships have been critical resources as we work to validate our idea and gauge demand, and our work has generated a number of inquiries from educational partners interested in piloting BestFit. Now, more than ever, we need to develop our understanding of how to run and grow a sustainable and scalable business. Joining the Solve community would have a tremendous impact on our ability to increase our reach, refine our solution, begin generating revenue and fundraise for our next inflection point.

Although our users are high school students, our customers are colleges and universities: our revenue model is dependent upon the number of institutional accounts and the average contract value. Thus, demonstrating the viability of our product for our first 2-3 flagship partners will be essential to establishing our credibility to other institutions. Solve will provide us with the business and technical advice we need to successfully validate our product for customers, refine our business model, and secure our first paying customers. Solve’s network and expertise is valuable given that higher education Edtech sales is highly referral-based.