July 7, 2026 · Episode 319
Motivated Students Still Drop Out: Using AI Behavioral Signals to Intervene Before Disengagement Becomes Attrition
34 Min · By Dr. Drumm McNaughton
Only 17% of struggling students ask for help. Learn how AI behavioral signals help colleges spot disengagement and intervene before students drop out.
Eighty-six percent of college students report being highly motivated when they start. Yet, forty-two percent of surveyed students say they came close to dropping out at some point, and across the market roughly 32 percent eventually do. Those figures come from a survey of 1,050 U.S. college students conducted by Elvee, and they reframe student retention as a strategic risk presidents and boards must confront: attrition is not a motivation deficit. It is a detection failure. Institutions still identify struggling students through grades and attendance, and by the time a student has failed an exam or missed several classes, many are already halfway out the door.
The scale is national. Forty-two million Americans now sit in the some-college, no-degree population, and the old saying still holds: the most expensive college degree is the one a student never finishes.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Raz Dar, CEO of Elvee, whose work with U.S. colleges centers on reading behavioral data for early signals of student disengagement. Dar comes to higher education from the commercial technology sector, and the episode applies that expertise to a retention problem the sector has struggled to resolve internally.
Disengagement Has a Signature, and It Appears Before the Grades Do
Dar defines disengagement behaviorally, not academically. A student who was spending five hours a day online studying, submitting assignments, and doing homework is suddenly spending half that or less. A student who logged into the learning platform daily, sometimes multiple times a day, is now logging in every two or three days. A student who was active in forums and discussions with peers and faculty goes silent.
No single dip constitutes a verdict. A student may spend less time on a course simply because it comes easily to him relative to others. The signal emerges over time, as data points accumulate into a map of individual behavior. That distinction is where AI-driven pattern analysis diverges from the threshold alerts most institutions rely on. The migration to online and hybrid delivery after COVID means students now touch far more systems, generating far more analyzable behavior than higher education has ever had access to. The open question is whether anyone is reading it holistically rather than one point at a time.
Grades and Attendance Are Lagging Indicators
The prevailing methodology for identifying struggling students remains grades and attendance. Dar emphasizes its structural limit: once a student starts failing and has missed several classes, the gap is very difficult to close, and many students at that point are already halfway out.
The model Dar describes inverts the timing: analyze behavioral data, including in-class attendance where institutions track it, and flag students who are beginning to disengage before exam period and before failure reaches the gradebook. The alert routes to the student success team with a clear directive: attend to this student now.
Dar identifies a step institutions routinely omit. Intervention is not the endpoint. Colleges provide tutoring or counseling, consider the case handled, and find the student on a dropout report two weeks later. A gap exists between the support the college provides and the way the student receives it, and closing it requires continued monitoring after the intervention to confirm the behavioral pattern actually changed.
Only 17 Percent of Struggling Students Request Help
The survey finding with the sharpest operational implications concerns help-seeking behavior. Colleges advertise their support services heavily, and students cannot plausibly miss them. Yet only 17 percent of surveyed students ask for help when they struggle. Fifty-two percent attempt to solve the problem themselves first and seek help only if that fails. Thirty percent never reach out at all.
The operational mandate follows directly: an institution that waits for students to approach it will miss most of the students who need it. The colleges Dar identifies as most invested in retention proactively approach students, in his words almost chasing them, in order to help. McNaughton locates the same dynamic in freshmen away from home for the first time. It is not that the professor or anyone else wants them to fail. Students do not know how to reach out, and institutions often do not know when to intervene.
The Dropout Drivers Are Operational, Financial, and Human
The survey’s top two dropout drivers sit nearly side by side. Seventy-two percent of students cited the challenge of balancing work and school, often because they finance their education themselves. Seventy-one percent indicated mental health or stress issues, a figure Dar notes exceeded his expectations.
A presidential onboarding engagement executed by The Change Leader, Inc. at a major R1 university identified student mental health as a central institutional challenge. McNaughton confronts the stigma still attached to the term: most of what students experience is not pathology. It is the ordinary weight of stressors that a large share of any cohort carries simultaneously. What a student frequently needs is a personal touch and the assurance that their experience matches that of most of their peers, paired with an institution prepared to listen or to tutor, whichever the moment requires.
The necessity of proactive outreach is illustrated by a case Dar shared involving a freshman who both worked and studied, entered an acute stress period before exams after events outside his control, and defaulted to silence, skipping his first exam and then his second. The critical intervention occurred when the institution initiated contact. The college told him not to stress, offered support, and authorized another attempt at the missed exams. The student’s reaction, as Dar recounted it: somebody actually wants me to succeed; they are with me in this, not against me. The student passed on the third attempt and progressed to the next semester.
The case carries a second implication McNaughton draws out. This student lived at home with a college-educated family and still approached withdrawal. First-generation students away from home for the first time carry the same stressors without that scaffolding, which strengthens the mandate for compassion and proactive contact.
Trust Is Built Before the Crisis, Starting at Day One
The institutions Dar identifies as most successful do not wait for challenges to surface. They build a personalized bond from day one and, in effect, escort the student from enrollment to graduation. The student knows a specific person he can always call, email, or text. At the start of the term, that person calls to confirm the student has their books, can get online, has Wi-Fi at home, has a computer. Some students do not, and the institution supplies them. When a challenge eventually arrives, the relationship already exists.
McNaughton argues the relationship must begin the moment a student commits to attend. He cites the University of Cambridge’s practice of running a second orientation, a bridge week for first-generation and lower-income students, where incoming freshmen meet their advisors and settle logistics before regular orientation begins, and Yale’s required freshman course covering money management, study skills, and the rest of the survival curriculum. Dar’s caution reinforces the sequencing: when a student struggles and the institution approaches, a relationship must already be in place.
A Dozen Advisors, Thousands of Students
The structural constraint is staffing. Student success teams remain small; an institution may enroll thousands of students and employ a dozen advisors. The range Dar encounters across institutions runs from a single person assigned yesterday to five people covering thousands of students.
This is where the system Dar describes functions as an operating system for student success. It produces a prioritized list of the students requiring attention now, directing limited advising capacity to the students at greatest risk first. The roadmap adds automation for students in the middle of the risk distribution: automated welcome messages, first-week outreach, and reinforcement when early struggle appears, with an advisor always reachable behind it. The intent is not to replace human contact but to ensure human capacity is spent where the data indicates it matters most.
Higher Ed Tolerates Attrition That Corporate America Would Never Accept
Benchmarked against commercial standards, the sector’s tolerance for attrition is anomalous. Customer turnover above 10 percent triggers alarm and investigation in corporate America. Higher education routinely absorbs a third of its students leaving and graduation rates near 50 percent. McNaughton’s assessment is plain: something is wrong there.
Dar concurs, and notes the market is moving. The legacy posture, we provide the academic services, go study, take the exams, graduate, is yielding to a recognition that institutions must chaperone students through. Tuition revenue is part of the motive at some private institutions, a point Dar does not dispute. In his experience, though, the people doing the work have it in their heart to see more students graduate.
The decision environment has also shifted. Dar graduated in the 1990s into a market where an entire engineering class aimed at large corporates and job fairs delivered them. Today’s students watch AI disrupt the employment market they are borrowing to enter, and some absorb the narrative that school is unnecessary because a billionaire founder skipped it. McNaughton’s rejoinder: roughly one in a billion actually makes that path work. The confusion is real, it feeds disengagement, and it raises the stakes on institutions demonstrating value and support rather than assuming persistence.
Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards
- Build trust with students before they struggle. When a student is in crisis and the institution reaches out, the outreach only lands if a relationship already exists. That relationship gets built from day one, through a named person the student can always contact, not discovered mid-crisis.
- Move from reactive to proactive. Only 17 percent of struggling students will ask for help. Do not wait for the student to call. Reach out, using behavioral signals to know when, and keep monitoring after the intervention to confirm it worked.
- Make retention a strategic, measurable KPI from the top, and resource it. If retention is a strategic investment, it needs a team behind it to drive it. One advisor assigned yesterday, or five people covering thousands of students, is a statement of priorities, not a strategy.
Quick Overview
- Elvee surveyed 1,050 U.S. college students about the factors that brought them close to dropping out or led them to stop out.
- 86% of students start college highly motivated; 42% later came close to dropping out; roughly 32% across the market eventually do
- The top drivers: 72% cited balancing work and school, 71% cited mental health or stress
- Only 17% of struggling students ask for help; 52% try to solve it alone first; 30% never reach out
- Grades and attendance are lagging indicators; by the time they flag a student, he is often halfway out
- Disengagement shows up first in behavior: study time cut in half, login frequency dropping, forum participation going silent
- Pattern analysis matters because a single dip can be benign; risk emerges from the accumulated behavioral map
- Intervention without follow-up monitoring routinely fails; there is a gap between support provided and support received
- The most successful institutions build a personalized bond from day one and escort students from enrollment to graduation
- Cambridge’s bridge week for first-generation students and Yale’s required freshman life-skills course model the front-loaded approach
- Student success teams are badly outnumbered, often a dozen advisors for thousands of students; prioritization and automation extend their reach
- Higher ed tolerates attrition rates that would trigger alarm at any commercial enterprise
- 42 million Americans now hold some college and no degree
About Our Guest
Raz Dar is the CEO of Elvee, where he leverages two decades of technology leadership and strategic sales expertise to drive competitive intelligence innovation. His career spans leadership roles across tech ecosystems, from early-stage startups to global enterprises. At AWS, he earned recognition as Israel’s Salesperson of the Year for orchestrating major cloud migrations and guiding enterprise clients like NICE through complex digital transformations. During nearly 20 years at Amdocs, Raz progressed from software development to senior sales leadership, managing a $50M P&L as Senior Account Executive for AT&T. His unique combination of technical depth and business strategy expertise drives Elvee’s mission of transforming how companies leverage competitive intelligence. He holds a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering & Management from Ben-Gurion University.
Connect with Raz Dar on LinkedIn →
Note: At the time of recording, Elvee was operating via its initial domain (elvee.ai). As Elvee scales its native integrations with institutional ecosystems (like Canvas), their primary web domain is currently undergoing updates and may not be available at the time of publication. To explore Elvee’s predictive student success data modeling or to follow up on the strategies discussed in this episode, you can connect directly with Raz Dar on LinkedIn or visit Elvee on LinkedIn.
About the Host
Dr. Drumm McNaughton is the founder, CEO, and Principal Consultant at The Change Leader, Inc. A highly sought-after higher education consultant with 20+ years of experience, Dr. McNaughton works with leadership, management, and boards of both U.S. and international institutions. His expertise spans key areas, including accreditation, governance, strategic planning, presidential onboarding, mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. Dr. McNaughton’s approach combines a holistic methodology with a deep understanding of the contemporary and evolving challenges facing higher education institutions worldwide to ensure his clients succeed in their mission.
Read the Podcast Transcript →
Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 319– with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Raz Dar
Introduction to Changing Higher Ed®
Welcome to Changing Higher Ed®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.
Note: At the time of recording, Elvee was operating via its initial domain (elvee.ai). As Elvee scales its native integrations with institutional ecosystems (like Canvas), their primary web domain is currently undergoing updates. To explore Elvee’s predictive student success data modeling or to follow up on the strategies discussed in this episode, you can connect directly with Raz Dar on LinkedIn (https://il.linkedin.com/in/raz-dar) or https://www.linkedin.com/company/elveeai/about/
[00:00:31] Welcome and Intro
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.
[00:00:37] Meet Raz Dar
Drumm McNaughton: My guest today is Raz Dar, CEO of Elvee , an AI-powered platform that transforms how organizations identify and can act on early signals of student engagement, which lead to their dropping out. Raz brings a rare combination of deep technical expertise and strategic commercial acumen to Elvee .
His previous positions include senior roles across the global technology ecosystem, companies that include Amazon Web Services and Amdocs. His ability to bridge product data and business strategy has been a defining theme throughout his career, and he joins me to talk about how institutions can improve student retention through proactive use of AI to monitor behavioral data that surfaces early risk signals to enable institutions to intervene before disengagement leads to dropout.
This is one of those podcasts where we’re tapping into commercial expertise, areas that could potentially help higher ed.
Raz, welcome to the program
Raz Dar: Hi Drumm. Thanks. I really appreciate being here.
Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure. I’m looking forward to a great conversation.
[00:01:47] Career Highlights
Drumm McNaughton: You’re at Elvee and you’ve had quite the career over many, many years. Not as many as mine, but you’re still a young kid. So give us, if you would, give us a little bit about your background. We’re gonna be talking about how higher ed can do better with respect to student retention, which is something that your firm does a great job with.
But you’ve had a fascinating career.
Raz Dar: Yes, I joined Elvee a year and a half ago, as a CEO of the company, and we’ll talk more about that, but prior to that, I spent most of my career at both corporate and startup companies, mostly in the customer-facing roles.
[00:02:26] From Engineer to Customer Focus
Raz Dar: I actually started as a developer. I’m engineer in my background. I studied industrial engineering, and I started as a developer actually out of college. But very early on, I decided that what’s really fascinating me is working with customers, is understanding the ecosystem, the challenges solving problems for customers, for their customers as well.
So I spent, the majority of my career I spent with a company called Amdocs, which is a leading customer care and billing system I worked with in the US. I was living in the US at the time, working with AT&T and Sprint and other big telecommunication companies.
[00:03:03] AWS and Startup Shift
Raz Dar: I moved to AWS, Amazon Web Services, to help big enterprises move to Cloud, and I worked with some very large organization, NiCE being one of them.
NiCE the big contact center solution provider. And then I decided corporate is enough. I moved to startups. I spent… and this is actually my third one. So, yes, I like taking challenges that are hard to crack.
Drumm McNaughton: So this is an interesting background.
[00:03:29] Why Higher Ed Matters
Drumm McNaughton: How did this prepare you for higher education? We’re seeing more and more people coming from corporate moving into education industry.
Raz Dar: It’s actually quite, it’s a fascinating topic and I’m really passionate about. First of all, I spent four years of my life in college. So, I felt it, I went through it. My kid is currently in college. He started his… He’s a freshman. So, and I, over, over the years, I’ve seen many people starting college and something happens, and they drop out.
It could be financial, it could be many reasons, and they decide to drop out of college or not even start, and that has a huge impact on their entire life and it’s not only them, it’s their family, it’s their environment. And this is really an interesting topic.
Drumm McNaughton: It certainly is.
[00:04:20] Engineering Mindset for Retention
Drumm McNaughton: My sense in the conversations that we’ve had is that your engineering background makes you very detail-oriented, so that in higher education, it is the details that make the big difference. The devil’s in the details, of course. But with those details, especially when we’re talking about student retention, which is really what Elvee specializes in, my sense is that probably prepared you to be able to look at the multiple data points that go into retention.
Raz Dar: Absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:04:55] Behavior Data and Engagement
Raz Dar: So, each and every one of us, has a certain pattern in life. You go to work, maybe you study, maybe you do some exercise, maybe you spend some time with your family, your kid. You touch a lot of systems along the way, and you do a lot of activities which are very easy to analyze.
And especially as a student, and especially students that are now, as colleges and universities move after COVID, more to online studies and even hybrid education, some online, some in class. There’s a lot of data points. They touch a lot of systems. They do many things that are very easy to analyze and identify based on those data points, identify engagement levels.
Now, some students, we obviously focus on retention. We obviously focusing on those students that struggle, that potentially are likely to drop out as a result. Not every challenge becomes a dropout. So it’s very easy to understand, to look at it holistically, not just one point.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes. Which is what needs to happen is look at it holistically. Right now, there’s 42 million folks who have actually dropped out. That old saying, the most expensive college degree is the one that you will never finish. But you at Elvee just did a survey about higher ed retention. Give us a little background on it because I think that really sets the story for what we’re seeing with retention and the factors that go into students dropping out.
Raz Dar: Absolutely.
[00:06:41] What Disengagement Looks Like
Raz Dar: We work with colleges and institutes to help them, using our platform and using our AI models, to identify students that are disengaging.
Drumm McNaughton: Okay
Raz Dar: What we wanted to do is we wanted to—
Drumm McNaughton: I’m sorry, I’m gonna interrupt. What do you mean by disengaging?
Raz Dar: Very good question.
[00:06:59] Defining Disengagement Patterns
Raz Dar: Disengagement means a student is starting to fall off or starting to get detached himself from the academics, from school. So if he used to spend, five hours a day online studying, learning, submitting assignments, doing homework, all of that, suddenly you see him spending half that and even less.
If you saw him logging into the platform, once a day or even multiple times a day, suddenly you see them logging in every other day or every three days. They used to be very active in forums, in discussions with other students or with faculties. Now they’re silent– they’re becoming more silent.
This is what I call disengagement.
Drumm McNaughton: So you’re looking at patterns.
Raz Dar: And we’re looking at patterns. Not all student that is suddenly, as I said, suddenly not spending enough time, doesn’t mean that he’s likely to drop out. Maybe the specific course that he’s taking is easy for him compared to others. So that’s fine.
He spends less time than others or less time than other courses. But over time, when you look at his pattern and you look at all of these data points and signals, you start to create a map of that student behavior and which can indicate on some challenges.
Drumm McNaughton: So you folks did the survey. There’s some good background on it, but I really like the findings that you had talking about folks first going into school, a very high percentage of folks who are motivated to succeed.
[00:08:42] Survey Goals and Method
Raz Dar: So Yes, going back to the survey. So we went to the actual student. We wanted to understand, not from the colleges who are our customers, but directly from the students. What caused them to drop out? How could we help the college help them? How could we identify it better?
How could we become more proactive in our approach?
[00:09:04] Motivation and Near Dropout Stats
Raz Dar: So we went to the source, we went to the students, and we surveyed over a thousand students in colleges in the US, and we found out that actually, when they start, they are very much motivated, very motivated. 86% are highly motivated.
Drumm McNaughton: Wow, that’s big.
Raz Dar: So they start with the, this aspiration, with this motivation, with this, they’re looking forward to the school. They want to succeed. They eventually want to get a career. And they want to succeed in life. And their parents, which I’ll talk a lot about, their parents also want them to succeed.
Drumm McNaughton: Of course.
Raz Dar: What else do you want from your kid. You expect him to be successful in life. So they come in very highly motivated, and then something happens. Amongst the thousand fifty, actually, this is the exact number, thousand fifty students, 42%, almost half, said that they felt close to dropping out at one point in time.
Drumm McNaughton: Wow.
42%. out of 1,050, that’s 425 students.
Wow.
Raz Dar: Yes. Exactly. You’re good in math, Drumm.
Drumm McNaughton: I was a physics major. I had to be.
Raz Dar: Now, eventually, in the average industry in the market is that 32% dropout. So not all of them do, but a lot of them thought about it. They almost came close to it,
32% eventually drop out, which is still a huge number. You could probably do the math.
Drumm McNaughton: What are the reasons why they thought about dropping out.
Raz Dar: Yes.
[00:10:40] Top Dropout Drivers Work and Time
Raz Dar: So the number one reason, very close to number two, is that they’re balancing between time and work becomes a challenge. A lot of it, they need to pay for school themselves. They need to work or they decide to work, and then balancing it out become a challenge because school is demanding. So that’s 72%—
Drumm McNaughton: Wow.
Raz Dar: It is about that, which is—
To some extent understandable.
[00:11:10] Mental Health and Stress Reality
Raz Dar: The other parameter, the other indication, which I was really surprised about, is that 71% indicated mental or stress issues.
Drumm McNaughton: Interesting.
Raz Dar: Very, very interesting. So something along the way happens, and they become either stressed, very stressed, they have some other mental issues, and they decide that, they cannot cope with it anymore. This is actually, and I experienced it firsthand, actually.
[00:11:39] Personal Story Freshman Struggles
Raz Dar: It exactly what happened to my kid, as I said, who’s this freshman in college.
He both works, he studies. Few things that happened that were out of his control.
And right before, and all the stress of exams coming in, exam period coming in, he just went into a tough period, a very tough period, which eventually he decided not to go into the first exam. Then he skipped the second one. He managed to get out of it eventually, and he went to the third with a lot of help, a lot of help from us, and ex- and external help.
He managed to get the third one, and eventually he was able to overcome this challenge and move on to the next semester.
Drumm McNaughton: Good for him.
Raz Dar: He’s fine. But I experienced it. I saw it. And you know what? Throughout his entire semester, every week, obviously, seeing him almost every day.
He still lives at home, luckily for me. Many kids, many students this age, they leave home. This is another challenge they have. They go to a place where they’ve never been before. It’s completely alone. They live with other people. They leave their entire community behind.
So that’s another challenge. Luckily for him, he still lives at home, so I was able to monitor it personally and address it right there in the spot.
Yes.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes. So, so these students become disengaged. There’s a risk that they could drop out.
[00:13:09] AI Early Intervention Model
Drumm McNaughton: You’ve developed at Elvee, this program using AI which monitors students, like you talked about, the amount of time online. You analyze the student’s activities to find out, is there a chance?
In the past it used to be like what your son experienced. You miss a couple of exams or things like that, which really can put you completely behind the eight ball. You’re looking at patterns here, are you not?
Raz Dar: Absolutely. That’s exactly what we do. So the current methodology of identifying student that struggle is looking at grades and attendance. And as we just discussed, once a student starts failing and he missed few classes, he opened up a big gap that is very hard to close, very difficult to close.
And this is the result that they– when they reach that point, a lot of them already halfway out. What we are doing, we are looking at their behavior online and any data point that we can get, by the way. If it’s not online, if we can get attendance, in-class attendance, if they track it, we get it as well.
And we detect based on those patterns of behavior, we detect students that are starting to disengage before exams period, before they start failing. And this is when we alert the system, we alert the student success team in the co- in college, “This is a student that you need to attend to now. This is the time to intervene and provide support.”
And so our system is basically, You can call it an operation system for student success, to identify student that struggle, that disengage, provide intervention, and also very important is to continue monitoring the student activities ongoing to make sure that the pattern was effective. Because oftentimes they think that they provided a solution to the student. They’ll provide tutoring or they send him to, to some counseling or any other measure that they have, and they have a lot of capabilities in their hand to support those students. But then they come up in a report a couple weeks later that the student dropped out.
They, it didn’t help. And so there’s a gap between the support that the college provide and the way the student receive it. So we close that.
Drumm McNaughton: It’s– the early intervention to me seems to be the key. If you can monitor the data points and you have trends based on all students, and I would assume for a particular college as well, you can start to see that flag that particular student to the student inter- success team or the, an early intervention. Many times, and when you stop and think about it, freshmen away from home very difficult situation for many students. They don’t know how to reach out to get help. It’s not that the professor or anybody else wants them to fail. They just don’t know what needs to be done to intervene or when to intervene.
Raz Dar: That’s really good point, Drumm.
[00:16:20] Why Students Don’t Ask for Help
Raz Dar: So although, again, a very surprising statistics that came out of the survey. Although colleges go above and beyond by advertising the services that they provide, and they have a lot of services that they provide students. They want the student to succeed.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.
Raz Dar: The student that responded to our survey, only 17% are asking for help. Only 17%. 52%
Drumm McNaughton: Wow
Raz Dar: are trying to first to solve it themselves, and only then, if they don’t succeed, they may be looking for help. 30% never ask for any help. They never reach out at all. Again, although the college is advertising the services and everywhere they go and they… cannot ignore it. For some reason, those students, they don’t ask for it. Only seventeen percent, which is really interesting.
So you need to be proactive. You need to– you don’t need to wait for the student to approach you. The colleges that are really invested in this and some of those are, they work with us, they are proactively approaching the student. They chase to almost chasing the student in order to in order to help them.
Drumm McNaughton: We did a project for a major R1 university a while back, and part of it had to do with onboarding the new president. So we talked about, where are the challenges that students are facing? And one of them was mental health. Goes to right what you’re talking about. And when people say mental health nowadays, there’s still a sigma, stigma around that.
It’s like, well, the guy’s gone dool- The English would call it doolally. They’ve gone crazy. But that’s not it at all. These students, especially the ones that have moved away from home, they have so much on their plates, they need that personal touch to just say, “Hey, you’re okay. You’re going through everything, you’re going through the same things that, that 80% of your other cohorts do. We’re here to help you, whether it just be listen, whether to be tutor on a particular subject you may not understand, but we’re here to help.” Oftentimes, that’s exactly what the student needs.
Raz Dar: Exactly. Absolutely. Can’t agree with you more. So the student comes in, he thinks that he’s having a challenge. He thinks that he’s the only one that’s gone through this. But, this– the college has so much experience. They’ve seen everything.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.
Raz Dar: So just providing the assurance, “You’re not alone.
We’re here for you. Other students ex-experience it the same, experienced it before. You’re not the only person that has in- is having some challenges. And again, we can help you. We want you to succeed.” So back to my kid, when the college realized that he’s not– he didn’t go into his first and second exams, they actually called him.
He– Again, he fell in, right into the statistics. He ne- he didn’t call them. They called him and said, “Hey, what’s going on?” And he said, “Look, I’m going through a phase.” Says, “That’s fine. We’re here for you. Don’t stress out. We will provide you this and this support. If you didn’t go to these exams, you can take it over.” For him, they said, “You can take it again. Don’t worry about it. You can take it the third, you can, like, kind of a third try,” right? And that provides so much assurance to him. He said, “Oh, wow, there’s somebody’s actually want me to succeed. I’m not against– They’re not against me. They’re with me in this.” Right? And that was,
Drumm McNaughton: so critical.
Raz Dar: That was critical. That was.
Drumm McNaughton: And it’s interesting, your son lived at home, lives at home. You had gone– it’s not like he didn’t have an example. You and possibly his mother, went to college, so they saw that they had that thing, and yet he still was going through the challenges. You think about your son, and then you think about the first-generation students who never had that example or away from home for the first time, the stressors there, we talk about mental health, this is just perfect, perfect normal things that folks in that situation go through.
We need to have a little more compassion with this type of thing.
Raz Dar: Absolutely.
[00:20:45] Building Trust from Day One
Raz Dar: And some of the colleges that we work with, they don’t wait for those challenges to appear with students. The successful ones, they create this bond, and a personalized bond with the student from day one. So they go, they almost to some extent, they escort him through from enrollment to graduation, and he knows that he has this person that he can always call, always email, always text.
He will be there, or she will be there to support. When they start school, they call him up, they ask him, “Do you have everything? Do you– Did you get your books? Did you– Do– Can you get online? Do you have Wi-Fi at home? Do you have all the basics,” right? “That will allow you to succeed?” And they– And if not, they can p- they provide support.
“Do you have a computer?” Some of those don’t have computers. So they provide all of those supports and when the time, when the challenge ha-happens, he knows exactly who to reach out to.
Drumm McNaughton: And a lot of this, it really needs to start, and you can tell I’m very passionate about this subject. This has to start when the student says, “I wanna go to your college.” You need to establish those relationships through the orientation. I’ve had guests on from University of Cambridge.
Who they’ve have with first gen, lower income students coming into the college, they have a second orientation.
They have what they call a bridge week, where the new freshmen come in and they go through in-depth things. So they’re not worried about where the classes are gonna be. They’ve met their advisors. They know these folks are there to help them, and then they go through the regular orientation. I think more colleges are starting to do this, and then some colleges, Yale, as a great example, they have a specific freshman course required for everybody, teaches them how to manage money, teaches them how to study, all of these things.
I think this is so critical nowadays for students.
Raz Dar: I can’t agree with you more. Absolutely.
[00:23:03] Scaling Support with Automation
Raz Dar: One of the challenges in this is that the, these teams are relatively small.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes
Raz Dar: So they could have thousands of students, but they have maybe d-a dozen of advisors. And this is exactly where our system comes to assist.
So we create this prioritized list of those students that you need to attend to now. Obviously, the more students you touch, the more students you talk to, you provide support better. But let’s first identify and attend to those that need it the most.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes.
Raz Dar: And in the future, we’ll introduce more and more automated capabilities, automation capabilities into the platform, so the student can get a welcome message. He can get, a first course, first week email. If he’s starting to struggle, he will get some enforcement automatically. Not waiting those advisors to reach out, and he can always call back.
So that’s kind of the challenge. There’s, one advisor on many students that they need to attend to.
to
Drumm McNaughton: Yes.
And it’s curious to me, you’ve got the student advisors, you’ve got the faculty, different roles, but they all play into retention.
Raz Dar: Right. They do. They do.
Drumm McNaughton: It stuns me that if when you’ve got turnover rates, like if you compare higher education to corporate America, if you’ve got a turnover rate of 10% or more than 10% from a customer perspective or anything else, you’re wondering what’s going on. Higher ed seems to tolerate, a third turnover or graduation rates of 50%. There’s something wrong there.
Raz Dar: Yes, I agree with you. I agree with you. We see in the market, we see a big change, in terms of how the colleges now-nowadays attend to those, to the students.
In the past it was, “We are providing you these academic services. Go study, go through the exams, graduate, everything is great.”
Now they understand that they need to provide more, and they need to, and they need to chaperone the student, and they need to help him out. And it’s not only because of tuition fee, tuition revenue. Some of it is, don’t get me wrong. Some of these private schools they care about the tuition revenue.
But I think for those people that work at it, it’s in their heart to help students succeed. It’s not about the money. It’s not about the revenue. They want to see pe- they want to see more and more people graduate.
Drumm McNaughton: And we’re living in so much more a complex world than when you and I went through college. It was relatively simple when I did. I graduated back in 1978, so it was a simple war. You had the Russian or the Soviets, you had the Americans. There was the Cold War going on, all of those kind of things.
There wasn’t the level of complexity that we have now that students deal with, whether, you’re a student, whether you’re an adult, there’s so much more complexity, and it’s easy to see why students get stressed out with everything that’s going on. We need to be able to help them.
Raz Dar: Yes and also think about, there’s few other factors. For– When we were– when I went to school, not in the ’70s, but in the ’90s, I went to school. When I graduated, my entire class, and as I said, I studied engineering, my entire class went to big corporates. They wanted to work at big corporates, IBM, Intel, Microsoft.
I went to work with Amdocs. So that was our goal. And we had these job fairs that these big companies came and nowadays, and especially with AI, people think they don’t need to study. They go through s- they start school, they spend a lot of time, a lot of money, four years in school.
And one, they don’t know if they’ll have a job at the end because AI is now disrupting everything. And second is they think, “Hey, everything is so easy today. I can use Cloud Code, and I can develop any application I want, and I can build my startup. I don’t need to go to these corporates.”
So that’s another big factor, and they, and they’re and those students are getting confused.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes. Yes, very much so.
Raz Dar: And they’re changing their mind, and suddenly they say, “Oh, you know what? I’ve seen people that succeed and make billions of dollars and become these entrepreneurs that didn’t go to school.” Or even advocate f- or some even advocate against school.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes. And it’s about one out of a billion who actually make that.
Raz Dar: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:27:58] Wrap Up and What’s Next
Drumm McNaughton: Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. Just to loop back, it’s so critical for that early intervention with students for your student retention, graduation rates, et cetera. And especially the freshmen are the ones who are most at risk, although they’re not the only ones.
So, early intervention, working closely with your student success team, with the faculty to make sure things, these are the key things that are necessary for improving retention.
Raz Dar: Absolutely. It’s, as you said, it’s earl- it’s the early… It’s first of all building trust with those, with the students because when they struggle and you approach them, they, you need to have a relationship. So first of all, it’s building trust. That’s one. Second is move from reactive to proactive.
Don’t wait for the student to call you. Reach out, to them. And second is make it a strategic, measurable metric or KPI from the top that retention is of retention. And put some people behind it to drive it. To reduce it, reduce the dropout rates.
People like student success teams, people like advisors, all the support capabilities that some do very well, and some we hear, “We have one person,” or, “He was just assigned yesterday,” or, “He’s a group of five people over thousands and thousands of students.” So if you make it a strategic investment, then you need to create a team behind it to, to drive it.
Drumm McNaughton: Well, you just gave three great takeaways, so thank you for that.
Raz Dar: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.
Drumm McNaughton: What’s next for you? What’s next for Elvee?
Raz Dar: So we are just starting. We are working already with thousands of students with colleges in the US, and we want to help more and more students. So, the i– first of all it’s about scale. Our focus market is currently in the US. So first of all, we want to scale our business to support as many colleges, institutes, and students eventually.
That’s one. We also are now introducing more and more automation and AI into the platform. So as we talked about, these student success teams are relatively small. We want to empower them to look at and attend to those that need the most. But a lot of the– a lot of the care and support for those students that kind of fall in the middle, that may need some touch-up, may need some care can be done automatically, either with an app, with AI.
So we are introducing now more and more AI capabilities into the platform as well. Eventually– And eventually, not– it’s not only about retention, it’s about supporting the student throughout, helping him with academics, prepare him for career, prepare for life.
Drumm McNaughton: Well, this has been a fabulous conversation. I really appreciate your taking the time with me, Raz. I wish you guys all the best. What you’re doing, I think is incredible, and keep up the great work.
Raz Dar: Thanks a lot, Drumm. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Drumm McNaughton: Likewise. Cheers.
Thanks for listening today, and a special thank you to my guest, Raz Dar, CEO of Elvee. Raz, thanks for joining me on the program. Thanks for helping us out with great ideas about retention and how AI can be a monitor of those areas that potentially lead to a student dropping out.
For my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. See you next week.
