EAB Acquires Concourse

On September 22, 2022, EAB announced its acquisition of Concourse—the company that created an alternative college admissions platform to increase access to higher education. Concourse’s proprietary technology reinvents the traditional application process, enabling schools to compete for students with proactive offers of admission and scholarships. The acquisition will transform how underserved and international students find colleges and scholarships by combining Concourse’s innovative technology with EAB’s 35 years of enrollment management expertise and vast network of college and university partners.

EAB’s mission is to make education smarter and communities stronger. We work with more than 2,500 institutions to drive transformative change through data-driven insights and best-in-class capabilities. From kindergarten to college to career, EAB partners with leaders and practitioners to accelerate progress and drive results across five areas: enrollment, student success, institutional strategy, data analytics, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I). We work with each partner differently, tailoring our portfolio of research, technology, and marketing and enrollment solutions to meet the unique needs of every leadership team and the students and employees they serve.

Concourse’s mission is to increase access to higher education by making admissions more equitable and student-centric. The company’s online platform connects anonymized student profiles with institutions interested in enrolling them. Schools can then proactively offer students seats and scholarships, effectively flipping the script on traditional admissions. Concourse’s reinvention of the process creates more opportunities for students, reduces counselor workload, supports secondary schools in their university guidance process, and gives universities powerful software tools to diversify and globalize their incoming classes. The Concourse platform hosts several programs, including Global Match for international students and Greenlight Match for underserved students.

Global Match connects universities in the United States, Canada, UK, and Australia with students from around the world, leveraging connections with guidance counselors at English-speaking international private high schools. This year, we estimate that more than 8,000 students from more than 50 countries will use the Global Match platform to find universities. Instead of relying on recruitment agents or cost-intensive in-country staff, the Global Match technology enables a scalable, cost-efficient way to recruit and enroll international students.

Greenlight Match—a partnership between EAB and Concourse—is a streamlined, equitable, student-college match process. It combines EAB’s existing relationships with universities and community-based organizations (CBOs) with Concourse technology. EAB and Concourse launched Greenlight Match in Chicago in fall 2021 to reduce barriers to higher education for students from families with lower incomes or those who are the first in their families to attend college. On September 22, 2022, we announced the expansion of the program to six new metropolitan areas. Greenlight Match enables CBOs to work with underserved high school students to build free, online student profiles, which multiple colleges and universities can review simultaneously. Students then receive competing college admission and scholarship offers, increasing the number and types of schools they consider. This process takes place earlier than historical enrollment deadlines, giving students more time to review a broader range of college admission and scholarship offers.

Students work with community-based organizations or high school counselors to build anonymized profiles showcasing their academic achievements and preferences. The technology then delivers matching student profiles, informed by each institution’s (and each student’s) selection criteria, to participating institutions. Colleges review matching profiles and make competitive admission and scholarship offers to students. Students receive multiple offers and information about college costs early in the college application process, which boosts their confidence and helps them plan for college costs.

The current college enrollment process works well for many but not all students. Students who come from families with lower incomes, those who are the first in their families to attend college, or students applying to US schools from overseas face outsize obstacles. They might not know about schools and scholarships that could be a good fit for them. Or they might be undermatched—a trend where some Black, Hispanic, and other underserved students are not given the same information, opportunities, or encouragement as their peers to enroll at an institution that will enable them to achieve their aspirations. At the same time, schools are struggling to diversify their student bodies. The Concourse platform reinvents the admission process to support underserved students and help schools recruit diverse and global communities of learners.

EAB has built a network of thousands of institutional partners and an ecosystem of complementary software platforms. Working with EAB, Concourse will accelerate its progress and expand its programs to support more students and institutions. Concourse clients will be able to work with the same platform they know and love, but the company will have the resources to innovate faster and make college more accessible to more students around the world.