Forward F1rst

We're creating resources and community to empower first generation college students to thrive on the road to graduation and beyond.

   Forward F1rst is working to close the first generation graduation gap by providing first generation college students with the information they need to succeed. Today, 3.4 million first generation college students are enrolled in 4-year colleges, but 1.5 million of them will never make it to graduation.

   We know that first generation college students have what it takes to graduate - we're gritty, persistent, and resilient. We also know firsthand how hard it can be to access the information needed to successfully navigate through college, when you can't turn to family for informed support.

   That's why we reach first generation college students with the tool they use every day--their cellphones--and use texts to connect them to the resources and on-campus support they need to succeed. Our approach is informed by behavioral science research reporting positive effects of low-cost, tech interventions on student outcomes.

   With these personalized, school-specific nudges, we’re closing the information gap between first generation students and their schools’ expectations.  By providing students with important dates, deadlines, and resources through our tool, we lessen the administrative burden on faculty and staff.  Partnering with Forward F1rst helps faculty and staff to maximize their time spent actually connecting with, advising, and supporting social & emotional growth in first generation students adjusting to college.

   The US economy is estimated to face a shortage of 16 million college graduates by 2025. By moving first generation students forward to graduation, we can end the college-educated labor shortage. We all win when first generation students are fully able to engage enthusiastically with their college.

We deploy existing text-based nudging technology in novel ways to support first generation college students through college and beyond. This approach is correlated with positive effects in combating “summer melt”—the phenomenon of high school graduates accepted to college not showing up to campus in the fall.  Our texts pick up where summer melt nudging leaves off and connect students who’ve arrived on college campuses to school-specific resources and on-campus support. Our solution empowers first generation college students with the information they need to maximize their social-emotional learning, achieve their goals, and change the world.

We’ve built an integrated messaging platform that reaches students with texts that provide them with the information they need to succeed.  Our survey data (n=1,789) reveals that 89% of first generation students who have a smartphone don’t have room for another app, so we decided to reach students with technology they use every day—texting.  First generation students at our partner institutions can opt into our personalized texts. Once they do, they receive only as much information as they need, decreasing information overload and increasing buy-in. Our low-cost, high-efficiency texting platform is the tool that enables us to reach students.

We aim to reach and empower as many first generation college students and graduates as possible. By July 2019, over 7,000 students we support who are slated to graduate in 2022 will be receiving support from us to prepare them for their second year. We aim to refine our solution through a robust analysis of the RCT we’ll be conducting during the 2018-2019 academic year to study the impact of timing and content of texts on student outcomes. Building on this, we intend to scale our solution to be prepared to serve an additional 15,000 students starting in August 2019. 

In the next 5 years, we intend to continue scaling our company to maximize our impact on first generation student outcomes. To date, we’ve spoken to over 30 college presidents who have expressed interest in bringing Forward F1rst to their campuses so we’re confident we’ll be able to scale rapidly, efficiently, and productively by building on those existing relationships.   To meet that demand within the next 5 years, we will be building capacity by hiring additional employees, forging more institutional partnerships, and collaborating with policymakers and researchers on our research.

This fall, we launch with five colleges and universities representing a broad range of institutions. We intentionally diversified our partnerships to build a robust tool that can meet the needs of the diverse population we serve. Students at our partner schools who opt into receiving nudges will have the option to enroll in a randomized control trial of the impact of our solution on key student outcomes, including social-emotional learning and academic and professional skill building.  The data we collect throughout the trial will enable us to responsively refine our approach to best serve the students who use our tool.

Forward F1rst’s text-based nudging launches in August 2018.  We aim to serve the 7,000 first generation students at 5 schools.  Schools will make a Forward F1rst account for each of their first generation first-years, which will generate automated emails through which students can opt into texting and provide as much additional information as they wish about their path to college and their goals for the future.  Our text-based nudges are free and accessible to students, regardless of phone type or texting plan because we cover the cost of all the texts we send and receive.

In 12 months, we hope to have partnerships with 3-6 new schools serving an additional 8,000 incoming first year students in August 2019.  Within 3 years, we will further increase our number of school and employer contracts to reach up to 50,000 students. We will be continuously assessing social-emotional learning, academic, and professional outcomes, including attrition rate, student engagement, mentoring relationship building, and future-self connectedness. Students will receive support in building these skills through nudges that assess their perception of their readiness to tackle specific challenges and accordingly coach them through the process of following through.

The Forward F1rst team is comprised of first generation graduates, including experienced student organizers, policy researchers, and developers.  We know how best to drive student success through text-based nudges because we successfully overcame the obstacles the students we serve will face.  Our approach is informed by behavioral economics research on text-based nudges and high-school student outcomes.  It’s our lived experiences as first generation college graduates that makes us the right team to apply existing research to reach current college students.  

We are a mission-driven business structured as a public benefit corporation with long-term profitability goals intended to sustain our solution and grow our impact. Our partnerships with schools are four-year contracts, structured so as to ensure we support their students throughout their four years of study. The annual value of our academic partnership contracts ranges from $100,000-$450,000 and our revenue projection for FY 2018 is $5 million, with annual operating costs under $250,000.

We move first generation college students forward, and we believe Solve can move us forward.  Forging synergistic relationships with organizations positioned at the nexus of academia and policy will help us increase our own efforts in those arenas. We are poised to bring our research, aspirations, and methods to a community of individuals who, like us, are making the world a better place and fully realizing equality of opportunity. We’re a team of resource aggregators for first generation college students and graduates, and are always seeking to join communities that aggregate the resources that will help us maximize our impact.

As we scale and partner with more institutions, we will need help gathering institutional-level information about deadlines, implicit expectations, and roadmaps for successful students. We believe we would learn and grow by joining a community such as Solve that includes people experienced in aggregating, synthesizing, and systematizing information across disciplines. Learning from those people would enable to refine our strategy and ensure we maintain and grow our ability to scale.