How to Empower Student Success Through Peer Tutoring

0:00:00.2 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Our guests today explore an innovative student led tutoring service that is having a big impact on a range of academic outcomes, including higher retention and graduation rates. So give these folks a listen and enjoy.

0:00:34.3 Ed Venit: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Ed Venit. I’m a managing director of Education futurist at EAB. That means that we spend a lot of my time thinking about, researching and talking with other practitioners to learn where this is all going, specifically around student success. One of the things we talk about a lot these days is about the academic preparation of the students that are coming into college. We have all seen changes from the pandemic and onward, and frankly, these were starting before the pandemic in the levels of academic readiness among our students. And it’s from our partners. We’re hearing quite a bit around the demand it will make upon advising offices and academic support. And really how do we help students do well in college at things like say, pre-calculus or even in the writing sequences as well. So we’re thinking a lot more about academic support and advising and how to support students, especially as their needs are changing over this time and perhaps increasing in volume. I’m here today with Samyr Qureshi, the founder and CEO of Knack, which is a company all around peer tutoring. Samir, welcome to Office Hours. Really would love to hear more about Knack and what you’re trying to do and how you go about it in the academic sports space.

0:01:47.8 Samyr Qureshi: Yeah, thanks so much, Ed. I appreciate you and the EAB folks having me here today. Yeah, happy to share more. You know, I started Knack with my co-founders about 10 years ago. Hard to believe now, really with the mission of helping institutions better reach, engage and retain more of their own students. Now today, every college campus in the United States offers a physical brick and mortar tutoring center. Institutions nationally are spending billions on academic support on things like those tutoring centers and advising centers and different programs and strategies that are ultimately focused on ensuring that every student has the ability to enroll and persist, ultimately have great postgraduate outcomes. The tricky part about these tutoring centers is that they’re oftentimes staffed like a restaurant. So that means they’ve got fixed hours at a location or two across campus. And they’re only able to support a certain number of courses and a certain number of hours per day because they’re dependent on hiring students and sometimes professionals that have fixed hours and schedules.

0:02:51.6 SQ: And they have to be monitored and sort of managed in that physical Center. So to help sort of lower the barriers for students to access those services and increase the utilization, whether that means they want to provide more hours of support, they want to provide more course coverage, or they want to sort of create better avenues for particular populations to request support. So think of first gen underrepresented students, Pell students, etcetera. And we create really a strategy with the institution to leverage technology where as an alternative to, but oftentimes we’re not really removing what the campus does, we’re adding on to it. Now we are partnering with these campuses and hiring more of their students to be tutors through Knack. And the beauty of our model is that we’re sort of building upon that sharing economy 1099 based model, which is that we’re onboarding these high achieving students and making it easier for more students on campus to be trained and qualified peer tutors. And then we’re leveraging our technology to deploy them to other students on campus. So, sort of akin to almost like an Uber Eats that sits on top of a restaurant model, right? The institutions got that restaurant.

0:04:02.6 SQ: But if they want to add more courses, they want to add more students, they want to ultimately sort of diversify their reach and get, more students to engage. We come in as a technology and as a, and as strategic partner ultimately to create high achieving, create jobs for those high achievers. Excuse me. And then on the flip side increase that, that network of tutors on campus to then have more students being able to access them. So we started, like I said, about 10 years ago. The model has now rolled out on over 100 campuses across the country. We’ve been really grateful to have been partnered with all sorts of institutions that could be an R1 or an R2, like a Georgia Tech or University of New Hampshire, University of Houston. It could be an HBCU like Florida A&M or Hampton or Fort Valley State. And that could be a community or state college like Miami Dade College or everything in between. That could be a small private college, Pacific Lutheran, for example, Fordham University of San Diego. So there’s not a type of campus we haven’t served.

0:05:05.1 SQ: And really this organization was born out of my own story. Coming to the States as an immigrant, struggling academically and sort of being behind and ultimately getting ahead due to tutoring. And that experience being transformative for me, not just as a way to fulfill volunteer hours or to make money, but honestly, it was such a fulfilling experience to help others and help sort of develop my own skill set as I became better at problem solving on the spot or critical thinking and such. And so our whole belief is that when you bring something like Knack to campus, you’re not just helping to reduce access barriers and gaps on campus, but the tutors are actually building amazing skills as well. So we like to say it’s sort of a learn and earn model in the spirit of work-based learning, while trying to sort of solve for this retention issue every campus is struggling with.

0:05:56.6 EV: Yeah, yeah, I love that. I mean, there’s… You said a lot of different things there that were kind of music to my ears. I hear a lot from folks who are on the university or college side of things, and there’s concern about their staff capacity right now. Where do we find folks? We’re under a hiring freeze. Our budget is tight. Well, there’s a lot of capacity right there on campus with the students. And we’ve always thought that this was a great thing. They know these courses as well as anybody else. Perhaps they’ve got work study money. That’s great. And they’re going to be relatively inexpensive and incredibly effective. And as you note, it also solves another issue for the student, which is gives me some great work experience. That’s why you noted your journey started right there. I had a similar experience in college in the admissions office, and that ended up being an early job for me. Part of the reason I do this now is because I had that early experience. I think a lot of folks listening to this podcast have had similar sort of things. So it’s nice to know that on campus work can be entrepreneurial and actually be a resume builder that can turn into things later on.

0:06:57.6 EV: So that’s also a very cool angle here. Yeah, let’s turn a little bit and talk a little bit about how make this real for me. Let’s say that you’re coming to campus. This is brand new. We’re bringing in Knack. Walk me through what happens. How do we get this set up? How do we market to our students? How do my folks work with you? What goes after we get to know and say yes.

0:07:21.1 SQ: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the big piece to highlight here is that we never come to a campus and say, shut down your tutoring center or bring everything over to us. You know, we come in and we say, look, your learning center is probably doing a really great job for the core curriculum, for the the larger courses, or sort of for the majority of the hours where students might be looking for help, but around the edges there. And in order to give students another option, knowing that no two students learn the same. And I always give the example, if you go to a dining hall on campus, you’ve got vegetarian, vegan meat options, everything, right? And so we’re feeding our students physically, but academically, how do we sort of give them not just different courses and degree offerings, but different avenues of support to ensure the completion of matriculation. And so I share that because I think a lot of institutions, especially now, as they think about being cost conscious now, have to make these decisions of do we cut costs and do we replace? And I think those decisions have to be made, of course.

0:08:24.0 SQ: But at the end of the day, we’re not coming in to necessarily tell you those things should go away. In fact, we build upon the great foundation they have. So our model is really upon partnering. We spend a lot of time at the institution doing program design. We brought decades and decades of experience from the industry into our organization. So folks like Dr. George Koo, sort of the godfather of high impact practices and student success, he’s actually our senior advisor, he’s been involved with the organization on staff for many years. And then we’ve got Page Keller, who’s a former president of CRLA, which is a certifying body of tutoring and training programs. And we brought these folks in to help work with the institutions to understand what populations really need the most support. What are the qualifications of a tutor? Can we mirror what you have on campus as much as we can. And then essentially once we’ve partnered, we are going out and doing that call for the tutors, recruiting them in partnership with the institution to say, hey Ed, you took principles of accounting and economics, you’re pre-qualified to be a tutor on Knack.

0:09:28.6 SQ: This is a great opportunity for you to earn a flexible income, work as much or as little as you want, earn 15, 18 bucks an hour, whatever the institution sets. And you make you get that great resume building experience in a way to help and stay connected to campus. Those tutors then opt in. They go through basic onboarding and training that talks about FERPA Title 9, Ethics, Do’s and don’ts, all those sorts of things. They get paid for that as they have their first tutoring session with students. Once we hit that healthy level of saturation, we have a main point of contact, the administrative level, that’s sort of our liaison to ensure programmatic success and awareness on campus. And we continue to do marketing and flip to demand side marketing, plug into different systems like your LMS, soon to be EAB as well, which allows sort of more of an integrated approach across the campus. And then you really start to see these bookings engage. And of course the institution’s got a whole dashboard view, resources, best practices, toolkits, assets to really help kind of co-market alongside us.

0:10:30.6 SQ: So we do a lot on the front end and then we run very hard and fast throughout the semester to kind of drive engagement. And once the flywheel begins and it gets acclimated into the culture of the campus, it tends to take flight real nicely.

0:10:43.6 EV: Yeah, it sounds like that’s a once you get things going, word of mouth kind of take this takes it from there. Everybody likes good flywheel. That’s right. So yeah, that’s awesome. And you know, everything you’re saying makes sense. I think will resonate with folks think already know some of the answers to this question. But… And you’ve already called out some of the, the expertise you’re bringing to, to bear on this. What you’re you’ve done this many times. You have a lot of the best experts in our industry here. Are there anything else? What other things when you might you call out as really making Knack stand out from say school that says, oh well, we have this on our own or we can do it on our own, you know, what else can I bring to bear on this or help convince somebody who might say, hey, these are tough times. Like I can’t really bring in a service right now, but you really can’t afford not to. So here’s why.

0:11:34.5 SQ: Yeah I would say it starts with really an internal analysis to understand. Okay, well let’s look at what we have. Right? It’s not, we’re not saying that. We’ve got something absolutely new with the notion of peer tutoring. Every institution does that. But let’s dive a little deeper and understand how many students are utilizing those services. How many tutors are you able to actually hire? How many courses are you covering? How many hours are you supporting? Because what we found is that close to 60%, sometimes 70, 80% of students that use Knack had previously never used tutoring in college before. So what that says is that there’s a huge population that’s going to not engage with your existing services, not because you’re doing a bad job, but because students have different expectations and desires today. Right. When it’s easy to be able to order food on on demand or watch a movie on demand or even go to your course on demand. You know, the question is, well, what are you doing in that same vein around academic support and with AI and you know, things like GPT and other services that are external to campus being places students already go? The question is, can we introduce other things that are mission aligned and that the institution can take part in to bring students back to campus and capture more of the interactions in house while giving them the feel that this is something that’s new and that’s flexible according to their needs.

0:12:54.5 SQ: And so the average campus that partners with us doesn’t come in and again, take away what they have, they add to it because they say, man, we’re only reaching 10, 15, maybe 20% of students with existing services. Where are the other 80, 90% of students going? Yeah, right. So if we can kind of help steer them back to campus and drive what we call sort of academically rooted social interactions, you’ve got a really great ecosystem where on one end you’ve got your high achievers earning an income. Some institutions, we’re putting over $100,000 back into the pockets of students every year. I think in the last couple years we’ve put in over 2 or 3 million in the pockets of students. So this idea of, okay, we’re creating work-based learning opportunities and then the double whammy is we’re scaling up support, frankly, at a lower cost than doing this at a physical center. And that’s really to say that restaurants use Uber Eats because they don’t want to go hire their own drivers and stand up the infrastructure, but they’re not taking away their existing staff. Right. They’re utilizing this to say we want to do more and we can do more with less using technology.

0:13:57.8 SQ: And so that’s really kind of the ask we have to institutions is to say, in a world where retention matters more than ever and access matters more than ever, when you’re seeing more and more students coming in as first generation, as underrepresented as Pell we have a moral imperative to be serving them. And what better way to do that than a technology sort of infused manner that’s utilizing your own students and putting money in their pockets to ultimately create community and boost those those persistence rates.

0:14:29.4 EV: Yeah, I love, love that explanation. One of the things that we talk about often with EAB partners on the student success side is sort of how much you get to have this technology that would free up a human and do human stuff. Technology can do technology stuff, automated stuff. And we all know in our jobs that we do tons of automated things or things that could be automatable. And you know, I can imagine trying to run my own peer tutoring program would probably be a lot of spreadsheet work. And I send it on emails, tracking things. I’ve got all these tutors to worry about. It would be lovely to have that all taken care of. So I can totally see the appeal of having that as kind of, well, we’ll just put this in place and let it run. All of what we’re trying to do here in terms of the clearinghouse, if you will, of tutors around campus. I also love the dashboard that you were talking about. One of the things we get asked about often is show me this works. That’ll be true for Navigate360 or Starfish. Show me that early alerts are a good idea or the registration campaign really works.

0:15:30.0 EV: And it’s always nice to have that kind of data. We also have a lot of conversations about how to sort of set expectations. You know, what does success look like here? What are we trying to do? I know you have a lot of those conversations as well around this and it’s always so useful. I think this is one of the fun things about higher ed. Folks really want to know that because sometimes I haven’t thought about that before necessarily. So, yeah, talk a little bit about this. Walk me through how you kind of set an expectation with this goal and what sort of statistics you may look at your metrics of success, what are your KPIs and you know, kind of what, maybe some surprising insights. What have you learned along the way that your typical school might not know if they weren’t looking at these kinds of data?

0:16:07.2 SQ: Yeah, absolutely. So I think again, there’s a question of can we increase coverage and access. And the average campus that’s working with us is increasing their course coverage by 4 or 500%. So a typical center is covering maybe 10, 20, 40, 50 courses, but in your catalog you’ve got thousands. And so just because I’m upper division agriculture major that doesn’t have a tutoring center tutor available because it’s not sort of a high DFW course across the institution or it’s not a a large enough course, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to get help from the institution. So as we leverage technology to increase sort of the awareness and the access of services. What we’re finding is that in addition to just increasing the course coverage and the diversification of who we’re reaching, like I had shared almost 60% having never used tutoring before. Across all of our partners, we’re also seeing the vast majority of sessions typically being outside the Monday through Friday, 9:00 to 5:00 work hours. Right. So when we work with a campus, we say, of course we all want to see retention go up, but we have to be careful not to get super carried away that this is a silver bullet for retention.

0:17:17.5 SQ: Obviously, we know academics are a huge component, if not the largest component alongside financial and social connectedness on campus. But the idea here is that if we’re able to cover more courses, if we’re able to increase your tutor pool, we’re now creating more jobs on campus. We’re also creating more bookings for tutoring, but we’re diversifying who’s accessing. It’s actually known that oftentimes with tutoring, especially at tutoring centers, typically the regular users tend to be the high achieving student, not the student that’s on the brink of the D, F or W that the institution’s most concerned about. It’s the student that’s oftentimes self-selecting in the services and has no stigma or concern of going in. And so we’re more so saying, sure, we’re not just going to drive up bookings overall and access an engagement on the tutor side and on the tutu side, but can we actually bring you students you’re not able to reach today? And that way when you start to disaggregate the data and start to understand the demographics, we’re hitting students that previously never used tutoring, that previously felt like the stigma was too high or there was a fear of being seen in a physical center.

0:18:29.0 SQ: So couldn’t we actually kind of help you engage the students you’re most concerned about to ultimately find an opportunity to close those access gaps and barriers. And so we’ve seen a number of institutions, we’ve done a number of studies as well, of course looking at DFW reduction since we’re directly hitting on grades. University of Florida did a pretty intensive study trying to actually remove confounding variables and look specifically at students who are predicted to fail that use tutoring versus students that were predicted to fail that did not use Knack tutoring. And it was a significant increase. Pell students especially had a massive lift. But it’s also not a, again, it’s not a silver bullet where a student goes to one session and magically they’re amazingly on track sometimes, but oftentimes not. It’s like a personal trainer where it takes time to go back and the more we can make tutoring cool and engaging and fun and social especially, that’s where you start to really see the magic of this. And that’s where you’ve seen large institutions say, hey, from a, from an outcome standpoint, this is a key, key strategy as far as we’re thinking about persistence and ultimately retention.

0:19:42.5 EV: There’s some things we can quantify, good things that are happening here that we can’t quantify. Talk a lot about sort of the social disengagement of college students coming out of the pandemic who maybe missed out on some of the sort of things they would have experienced in the latter part of high school in the before times, if you will. That’s not starting to happen with more normalcy now. But there’s a cohort of students that happen to be in college right now that are having trouble, as they call it, making friends in real life. So there’s an opportunity here through the work that you’re doing to really foster connections, build friendships. And it’s nice when it’s around academics. It’s gonna be really hard to quantify that though. But do you hear say, anecdotal stories around how this is been helpful along, say for an individual student or for a campus in promoting wellness or promoting social connection, getting those kind of the non-tangible benefits, helping folks build some of those social skills that maybe they didn’t have a chance to until now are creating more of. I can see the appeal here.

0:20:47.6 SQ: Absolutely. I mean it’s pretty interesting. So we obviously track like the academic side and try to understand from a quantitative and a qualitative aspect how much of an impact it’s happening on those specific areas. But sort of the softer side of it, if you will, or the more like organic side of just meeting up with someone is that these, these conversations transcend beyond academics. It may start about calculus or chemistry or what have you, and the challenges with your exam, but it may also lead to talking more about how do you sort of work on the anxiety that you might be feeling or what resources on campus might you also want to get plugged in for or just more generally of hey what clubs are you in? And that’s sort of part of the technology that we built. But it’s also just part of the natural, authentic conversation students are having in the context of their academics through Knack. Right. So to sort of understand that, oh Ed is not just accounting tutor, he’s also sort of the president of the accounting honor society. And now I’d like to kind of learn a little bit more about that.

0:21:47.9 SQ: So there’s so many sort of, as George Koo says salutatory benefits that come out of this. Like, it’s just sort of natural. And I think those are the things that are harder to capture. Like we hear so many stories and anecdotes of students saying it started out as a tutoring session, it ended up as being someone that I look up to as a role model or that I’m talking to about what I want to do post grad or we’re actually friends and we’re going to hang out. And it just is so crazy that it started in a tutoring session. And we love that. Right. That’s just so great. And inherently important experiences as a student today on a college campus.

0:22:24.9 EV: Yeah, I mean, in the end they’re, they’re college students, they’re going to do college student stuff. And you know, that was maybe we would always say you learn as much outside of the classroom than inside. And these sort of experiences and these are sort of connections that make that kind of learning possible. I think that’s great. So I think we’ve got a lot of folks excited about the idea of peer tutoring and Knack. We haven’t talked so much about the economics though, of how this works. Tutoring. You know, you’re going to pay these tutors. So who’s paying for the tutoring, who’s paying for the software? How does the economics of this all work?

0:22:58.3 SQ: Yeah, so we actually, we have zero mechanisms for students to pay out of pocket on the product. We have great ways for them to make money as tutors. And so of course, if the tutor’s wages are baked in there, what that means is that we have 100% partnership driven model. So the institution partners with us. We sort of set up a program based on, based on what their strategy really is on, on engagement. We scope that accordingly and as part of the fee they pay us, we’re remitting a portion of that back to students. In some cases we’re talking 50 to 80% of those dollars go back to students in the form of wages. So again, you’re talking six figures going back to students in some cases, which is really awesome. But of course, as an organization we have to survive. And that comes by us ensuring that we have a margin there. And of course we’re adding a lot of value by way of enhancing and expanding the opportunities for students to connect for tutoring and support. But the technology and the data that we’re able to help uncover for institutions can oftentimes lead to other benefits around if there’s a cluster of students struggling in this area, what might that say about their learning needs, the curriculum that students or sorry, that department’s faculty. Right. And so can we sort of leverage this data to help course correct so that everyone’s winning in terms of the student, the institution and us as, as the as the platform partner.

0:24:28.6 EV: And not to mention, I mean, if you’re looking through it from the lens of the student themselves absent or any tutoring, I got to go find that on my own. You’re offering an economy of scale not just to that student, but to all the students at the institution. Because of course, you’re doing this hundreds of institutions across the country, economies of scale are exactly that. Right. So we’d be able to offer their services, get more to. You’ve talked about, one of your big goals is to get broader coverage around campus. You know, Admiral, right there, being able to do that, certainly worth what I would pay for that. But also just looking at it from the student’s perspective, this has got to be one of the least expensive ways to get garden variety student off the street, connected with a tutor of some sort, especially in a day and age where it might be an unattainable expense for many of our students. So there’s a really great way to look at this as actually this is the right way to do it. And if you want to democratize the access to these services something like Knack is the way to go undergraduate. Samyr, I know we’ve only really scratched the surface on this. Are there other things you’d like to sort of finish out with as we conclude our time here today? What else about Knack should we know that we haven’t talked about yet?

0:25:37.2 SQ: You know, I think, I think we’ve covered a lot on Knack and I would just sort of leave the audience with an anecdote that really kind of helped me understand the importance of this piece here is of putting students in the center and putting students first. There’s a lot of question and distrust and scrutiny about higher education right now. And it’s it’s challenging, I’m sure. And we’ve seen with institutions as to how to make sense of that and continue to serve students amidst all the chaos and the noise that we’re trying to try to make sense of. And one of the things we were partnering with an institution pretty recently and had a meeting with the provost and their council. And it was really great because as part of the meeting, it was refreshing to see they actually brought some students in. And what I really appreciated about this, the leadership at the institution, was that they did that as a recognition of, like, who are we here to serve? Right? As a mission driven nonprofit institution, it’s to serve students.

0:26:43.1 SQ: And what they did was they let the students sort of listen in. And then after we were done, the first person they let speak was a student. And they said what questions do you have or what experience do you think this would have for the student body? And what was fascinating about it, and it wasn’t, was not rehearsed or planned, but it was just, it was just, I guess, happened to be the right product and hitting the right need for the student. The students said what’s crazy about this is I’ve been looking for more help and I just couldn’t find it on campus or I didn’t really feel comfortable going in, or the hours didn’t work for me. So I found another student who had the similar experience. And we actually are splitting a private tutor and we’re paying out of pocket to make sure that we graduate on time and that we feel good about our academics. And the provost sat up in their chair and they said, how much are you paying? How long have you been doing that? How often are you meeting do you know how many other students might be doing that? And the student said, I don’t really know, but I would love to have this for free and I would love to just know that I could click to connect with someone on campus instead of paying for a professional tutor who’s 50 to 100 an hour.

0:27:53.3 SQ: And I think what, besides the sort of like, obvious piece there, that Knack can be relevant to most campuses, if not all around, students having unique needs and institutions needing to meet those needs. Again, going back to just sort of the challenges in the space and the recognition of higher ed really having to manage change, right? Change management is sort of the name of the game. Whether they’re considering a technology solution like EAB or Knack or anything, rather just sort of making sense of what’s happening and what’s coming out of the federal government and how to respond. I think as part of change management, bringing students in to remind everyone and sort of refocus this at this number one priority of students and student success is should be top of mind and should be sort of the best way to go about this so that as much as self-interest is always going to be there, and we all have that remembering sort of the core mission and remembering who we’re there to serve will allow us to sort of figure out what’s best and to have that tight feedback loop to ensure we’re building and moving in the right direction to ultimately help students.

0:28:55.5 SQ: And so, yeah, I would just sort of leave institutions with the idea of don’t just pay a group to put a strategic plan together and throw it over the fence and hope everyone figures it out. It takes real accountability and it takes real incentives to allow folks to take calculated risks and bets. And the best ones are those that ultimately are serving students the best. And the more we can bring students back into the conversation, into the center, the more I think we’re going to earn that trust back that the public has seemingly been questioning.

0:29:24.6 EV: I mean, I completely agree with you. At a time when strategy is really difficult, who knows what’s going on? It’s a bit chaotic. Having a North Star like it’s about the students is really, really helpful. Something I’ve said a couple times recently, and it echoes the words that you were just saying there. It really doesn’t matter the political stripe, who you are, parents, students, employers, the governor, colleges themselves. Everybody wants better student outcomes. They want good things to happen to students. And it’s nice to have that at the center. Something and say something like, well peer tutoring is clearly in line with that. Let’s look at that. That’s something that we know we can focus on without question and have it be a good thing that will happen as a result. So thank you very much for kind of ending on that spot and centering us on that. I think that’s a great moment to end on. This was great. Thank you so much for being with us today here on office hours. Really appreciate you. And hopefully this won’t be the last time we hear from you again soon.

0:30:18.7 SQ: Yeah, likewise. Thanks so much, Ed, to you and the rest of the EAB team for the opportunity and look forward to diving deeper in further soon.

0:30:26.5 EV: Samyr Qureshi from Knack, thank you very much.