Annual Impact Report

Reading is arguably life's most important skill. Problems with reading and literacy are among the biggest hindrances to early education, and advanced literacy is considered a prerequisite for success in adult life and the workforce. Pre-COVID, 2/3 of eighth graders lacked adequate literacy skills. Interrupted learning has made the problem worse. Moreover, about 15% of the general population demonstrate symptoms of dyslexia, including slow or inaccurate reading, spelling issues, poor writing or word mix-ups. The disparity in reading skills among children is indicative of an income-achievement gap with substantial discrepancies between the literacy ability of kindergarteners from high and low-income families. Furthermore, a post-pandemic academic decline is having a profoundly negative impact on students’ ability to perform basic academic functions and threatens to hinder national progress. In reading, 4th and 8th graders are performing on par with students in the 1990s, and around a third of students in both grades are unable to read even at the ‘basic’ level.

With artificial intelligence progressing at lightning speed, such negative impacts to learning gains in schools are inexcusable, and this is clearly a gap that needs closing.

Amira is an intelligent reading assistant that listens, assesses oral reading fluency, and tutors, accelerating reading mastery and inspiring students to enjoy reading through the use of appropriately challenging and engaging stories.

Amira uses artificial intelligence to do three things: assess students’ reading mastery, including through a fully-automated dyslexia screener; provide scaffolded reading practice, drawing from reading science-backed interventions; and generate diagnostic reports and insights for teachers, administrators, and parents based on each reading session with the student. In this way, Amira saves teachers over 90 hours in the course of a school year and helps students get significantly more practice and feedback.

The Blackwell Public School District in northern Oklahoma has a free and reduced lunch population of over 80%. The area is considered one of high poverty, and students in the district experience significant struggles with reading and writing comprehension in school.

Fourth grade teacher Mindy explains that she was initially skeptical of adopting Amira in her classroom, given the many challenges her students face and the complications that would undoubtedly ensue should the technology fail in any way.

“The ‘aha’ moment for me was when we took our winter assessments,” she explains.

The next day, I came in and saw the progress reports. I called each kid up to my desk, one at a time. We looked at their correct words per minute in the fall, and their correct words per minute in the winter, and assessed their gains. The joy on their face when they saw their gains was incredible. It didn’t matter what student I was talking to. If they were a high achiever, a middle of the road reader, or a struggling kid…. This proved that anyone can make significant gains... Overall, the growth was incredible and I believe it’s because of Amira.

Mindy points to one student in particular who she feels best highlights the ability of Amira to raise the bar for all students, regardless of level, and who demonstrates the power of personalized reading instruction to inspire and motivate.
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“I have a student with extensive special needs who spends a lot of his day in a Life Skills class. So he hasn’t been on Amira quite as much because he’s not in regular instruction as much. But he has spent some time in the program. And he had done both assessments, so we had the data for him. When he came up that day and I showed him his scores just like everyone else, he was absolutely thrilled to see his growth. It wasn’t huge – I think he gained 15 words per minute – but hearing about his growth was so powerful for him. On his way back to his seat he was showing his score to all the students he passed. His words may not have been as high as theirs, but his gain was just as good or even better than theirs. The other students were patting him on the back and cheering him on. He had a great day because he doesn’t always get the praise that others do.”
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Mindy has taken a personalized approach to using Amira with her students. Several days a week, she asks her students to finish their work early, then get on Amira and choose a number of stories to complete. 
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“I’ll have students come up and ask if they can do more stories,” she laughs. 
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As for Mindy’s desire to continue using Amira in her classroom?
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“Ultimately it doesn’t really matter that I’m sold on Amira. I think my students are sold on it and they see what it can do for them. We have had that conversation as a class. I asked them, ‘Are you noticing any difference in your reading when you’re reading a book?’ and they tell me things like, ‘Yes! I can read a chapter book in one week now, but it used to take me two weeks or even three or four.’ Other kids tell me, ‘I will actually read a chapter book now, but in August or September there was no way I would choose a chapter book to read.’ So those are gains that mean more to them than numbers. Even the students who were hesitant have now really bought into Amira and frankly, bought into reading. 

Beyond the impact experienced in this school, the power of Amira as a tool to embolden young readers with the skills and confidence they need to persist in their education is evidenced by its high adoption and readoption rate, as well as its success rate in driving outcomes across states. 

The New York City Department of Education, for example, evaluated Amira’s impact in over 100 schools across all boroughs, and ultimately chose to purchase Amira for every K-6 student across the city. The Chicago Public School District similarly committed to a district-wide implementation beginning in the summer of 2023. In the state of Louisiana, the state Department of Education subsidized Amira for use with English Language Learner students in 15 districts.

“Earlier, Mondays were boring,” explains one young student. “But now I look forward to coming to school on Mondays because we have our Amira class.”

Students from historically marginalized communities are not only underrepresented on college campuses nationwide, but also face exclusion and struggle to find belonging in the student experience. Opportunities to build social capital, network in structured ways, and build community can be limited, at best. Academic advising – a highly regarded resource, but one that relies upon trained, in-house personnel – is too often stretched and incapable of offering the kind of 1:1 support that students from marginalized communities may require.

While it is estimated that more than half of the graduating high school demographic will be students of color by 2036, some 92% of higher education institutions are failing to enroll and graduate such students on par with the rates for the general population. Yet, even when they do, those students tend to enter a world that feels like it was built for someone else. Many institutions cater predominantly to the wealthy, white, male demographic in both their student success strategy and their apparent allocation of campus resources.

What is the bottom line of all this for students of color? Compared with white students, college students of color experience higher rates of loneliness, emotional stress, anxiety, depression, and hopelessness – all factors that make academic success a needlessly arduous undertaking.

Mentor Collective advances an identity-conscious student success agenda through algorithmically enabled peer mentorship. The platform empowers trained peer mentors to use active listening skills to help struggling students find their way through what is too often a laborious and isolating student experience. 

Mentees are prompted to match with mentors who have similar life experiences in order to improve their sense of belonging. For example, one might be encouraged to look for a mentor who has worked a job during school, cared for a relative, or dealt with the death of a family member.

Peer mentors help mentees by offering solutions to challenges, suggesting resources and coping mechanisms, and normalizing the need for help and support. Beyond that, they urge mentees to find peer support networks on campus, including campus clubs and groups with shared social interests and values. The benefit of a first-generation student connecting with someone who has “been in their shoes” cannot be overstated.

The Mentor Collective dashboard offers users advanced insights, including the number of conversations logged, and priority flags that show how and where a mentee may be struggling, enabling the mentor to proactively offer help, and empowering the institution to intervene as necessary. Other visible metrics include demographics engaged, and a granular view of the mentor-mentee funnels. This level of insight, along with advanced benchmarking capabilities and institutionally branded communications, gives administrators the ability to design and manage a high-impact mentorship program in just two hours per week.

The impact of Mentor Collective is best demonstrated by examining two distinct case studies that span geographically and institutionally unique higher education institutions and student experiences. These use cases showcase the platform’s ability to cater to exceptionally diverse student bodies – even at a time when most students – and when the institutions themselves – faced marked uncertainty.

The University of California at Riverside (UCR) enrolls a student body of 26,434 students, with a Hispanic/Latine student population of 38.7%. Around half of UCR’s students are categorized as low-income, historically underserved, or first-generation college students. Yet, the institution ranks lowest in its statewide system for the amount of funding awarded per student.

Looking for options to drive greater engagement and retention among its student body without sacrificing efficiency, UC Riverside opted to launch the Campus Collective peer mentorship program in 2020. This decision was made in the midst of the pandemic and at a time when students were learning and networking remotely. However, the pilot continued once in-person learning had resumed in the 2021-2022 school year.

The UCR team relied upon Mentor Collective’s early-alert flags, building them into their program in such a way that administrators could respond directly or equip the mentor with relevant resources to support the struggling student. The early flagging system worked better than anticipated.

“...The flags started to decrease over time, because once mentors learned where to go to find information on their own, they didn’t come to us as much.”

Looking at UC Riverside’s usage of Mentor Collective, even as the number of flags decreased from year one to year two, the number of text messages greatly increased (from 56,272 in year one, to 87,666 in year two). So, too, did the number of conversations logged (10,370 in year one to 18,301 in year two), pointing to quick mastery of the intuitive platform as well as a more robust understanding among mentees about available communication channels and the benefits of peer mentorship. 

“We adopted this tool in response to the pandemic,” shared Dr. Ken Baerenklau, Associate Provost at UCR. “But after seeing consistent lifts in retention, we plan to continue offering this valuable resource to our students…”

Participating UCR freshmen saw 89.3% retention, from term to term, compared to 87.1% for non-participants.

At the University of North Carolina - Greensboro (UNCG), the Transfer2Transfor peer mentorship program was launched using Mentor Collective as part of their mission to be in service to a diverse student body with unique challenges. Thirty-seven percent of its students are Pell-Grant recipients, and UNCG is classified as a Minority-Serving Institution (MSI).

Some 40% of UNCG’s students have transferred from other institutions, and a recent survey indicated that transfer students in particular were struggling to connect to the campus experience.

“There’s a stigma among transfer students around help-seeking,” explained Dr. Samantha Raynor, Assistant Vice Provost for Strategic Student Success. “So just being able to know if they’re using our resources and even if they knew those resources existed was important.”

In the UNCG mentoring program’s pilot year, nearly a quarter of UNCG’s student body signed up to be mentees, and 171 students volunteered to be mentors.

The results? Mentees’ sense of belonging at UNCG increased from +9.91% in year one, to +14.78% in year two.

With a transfer student population, we may only have two to four semesters to engage with [students] depending on their time to completion. How can we help them navigate the institution in that compressed time frame? This one system allows us to capture student voices and filter information effectively. That has aided me in both my connection with students and my ability to react.

Trina Gabrial, Assistant Director of Transfer Initiatives at UNCG

The workforce retention and engagement problem has reached epic proportions in the U.S. To-date, fewer than a third of full- and part-time employees working for organizations are classified as “engaged” and nearly one in five are “actively disengaged.”

Chief among the reasons for the disengagement? A growing number of workers today do not feel that they have opportunities to learn and grow, and many cite that their organization refuses to invest in them and their future.

What is the net result of all this employee disengagement? A growing chasm between what the workforce needs, and what is available in the labor market…to the extent that, by 2030, it is estimated that low employee retention will cost the U.S. more than $430 billion a year.

Pathstream is a career mobility platform that helps companies drive down exorbitant frontline turnover costs by ensuring employees have supported paths for internal career advancement.
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They do this in a number of ways, including by supporting employers with employee education and certification initiatives in partnership with leading universities.

Pathstream also offers learning journey mapping that factors in both the requisite skills employees need to build, as well as transferable skills they may have gained in past roles. Furthermore, Pathstream extends ongoing career coaching and support to managers, giving them the vision and insight to build internal career paths that keep business-critical jobs filled in both the short- and the long-term.

Pathstream has partnered with a number of world-leading brands to support career mobility among key workers. Their partnership with Amazon is one such example. In 2021, Pathstream started working with Amazon to empower frontline workers at 10 warehouse facilities to use Pathstream’s Career Mobility Platform. The organizations worked closely together to design a program that would be customized to Amazon workers’ specific needs.
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This process involved an extensive intake process that gauged existing transferable skills of workers, as well as their career interest areas. From there, workers were matched with a Pathstream career advisor who helped them design their own learning journey.  Notably, 73% of the Amazon program participants are people of color.

This career mobility program came at no cost to Amazon workers, who were offered the opportunity 
to use tuition assistance benefits to enroll in an array of courses – some for college credit – that matched their personalized learning pathway. Delivery was flexible and offered outside of associate’s standard hours, so as not to interrupt mission-critical work.

The appetite of Amazon workers to build a highly employable, transferable skill set is reflected in the career paths many of them chose to pursue.

“From the beginning, one of the most popular career paths has been data analytics,” explains a 2023 customer success story on the partnership. “Within the first month, 200 warehouse associates signed up to begin a Data Analytics Certificate program offered in partnership with Tableau via the Pathstream platform. Through the program, associates gained capabilities in business analytics fundamentals, SQL, data visualization and more to prepare them for entry-level data analyst roles.” 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the demand for data analytics roles will increase by 23% by 2031 – far faster than the job growth average of 5% across all industry roles.
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The career mobility initiatives Amazon workers received translated directly into not only heightened engagement and general satisfaction with Pathstream, but also to a 208% boost in retention for participating vs. non-participating employees.  And, for many workers, it translated into something immeasurably important: job satisfaction and hard-earned promotions. 

“I got this promotion because I did exactly what the program taught me,” explains Portland Reed, a warehouse operations worker at Amazon who earned a promotion after completing the Pathstream program. “I was no data expert before the program. But it equipped me with the tools to execute and excel. I parlayed what I learned in my actual job and improved our department’s productivity. This program is not fluff; it’s practical and it’s what you need to learn to break into the data industry.” 

Pathstream serves frontline and early career employees at over 300 organizations including industry-leaders such as Salesforce, Citibank, Walmart, and many others for whom comparable results have been achieved from investing in career mobility.
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For Leslie Smith, a technical support specialist who wanted to advance in her career through the Salesforce Advanced Administrator exam, Pathstream offered exactly what she needed to make progress in spite of a busy schedule and the demands of parenthood.

“I liked that [Pathstream] was online, self-paced, and still structured,” she explained in a case study. “Pathstream’s success coaches kept me on track and were accommodating… It took me time to transition to a Salesforce role. But I kept with it and it paid off. The Florida A&M Salesforce Admin Career Certificate put me in my career’s driver’s seat. I am now an Implementation Consultant and got a $35,000 raise.” 

Leslie Smith, technical support specialist

Math concepts are notoriously – and often needlessly – challenging for countless students. A big part of the problem? Any absence from class, distraction, or difficulty understanding a topic poses an immediate risk to a student’s ability to master mathematical concepts and pass their classes, and the cycle of math failure is a vicious one to break. Math tutoring – long seen as the solution to this problem – is unaffordable for many and unrealistic in terms of the time requirements and the extra burden it can carry for families. Traditional tutoring also tends to focus on passive knowledge transmission, rarely empowering students to engage in self-directed knowledge construction. 
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Yet, math learning loss has been especially rampant in elementary schools since the pandemic. This kind of learning loss is pervasive, and also disproportionately hurts students of color. In the 2020-2021 school year, 5th-graders were learning less than 50% of the historical average amount of math learned. For students of color in 5th grade, that number was closer to 40%. Data for grades 1-4 show math attainment of less than 75% of the historical average overall, with students of color hovering at closer to 50%. 
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One school year later, overall student math achievement in all grades is still below pre-pandemic levels.

PeerTeach brings simplicity to the math learning environment, enabling students to access extra math tutoring from the comfort of their classrooms while learning from – and with – peers.

By training peer helpers, the PeerTeach platform empowers students to rise to the challenge of teaching others the concepts they themselves have already learned – long proven to be one of the best ways to learn and retain information. A gamified learning environment makes the experience fun, intuitive, and rewarding.

Prior studies have focused on the ability of the trained adult tutor to conduct effective learning interventions, yet to-date, there has been little focus on what happens when K-12 students are trained to teach their peers. A Stanford University report written by Dr. Soren Rosier, CEO of PeerTeach, and supported by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship, explains that “past studies have consistently showed adult tutors tend to do much more explaining than tutees, place minimal demand on tutees when questioning (Graesser et al., 1995), and rarely stimulate deep-level reasoning or monitor the understanding of tutees (Graesser et al. 1995; Roscoe & Chi 2007).”

Rosier set out to demonstrate the efficacy of learner-centered teaching methods like those used by PeerTeach, conducting a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how peer-led and student-centered teaching techniques can benefit K-12 students. The research team conducted experiments with 198 middle school math students, using two interventions with distinctly different designs in order to test the viability of online, scalable training.

Rosier defines learner-centered peer tutoring as emphasizing learners actively participating and constructing their own knowledge, as opposed to passive knowledge transmission. In the trial, subjects were told the learner-centered pedagogical approaches to use and then prompted to practice identifying and executing them.  For example, students would practice making strategic teaching decisions, and would be urged to consider when to “gather intel”, “say it back”, or “press for reasoning” in a given tutoring scenario. They were encouraged to avoid overly didactic teaching and instead use “elicitive strategies” to draw out the tutee’s knowledge.

The results of the study show that PeerTeach interventions successfully increased the frequency of students using “elicitive” techniques in both virtual and real-life tutoring scenarios. The result was significant learning gains for those students being tutored.

Students in the control group had mean scores far below those taught using the interventions. The students in the intervention reported that their tutors asked questions (25% across both groups, compared to 0% for the control group), promoted active learning (44% across intervention groups, compared to 4% for control group), and were less likely to report that their tutor was “unhelpful” than those in the control group.

The combination of math knowledge with PeerTeach training produced more learning at every level of math proficiency…After just 40 minutes with both PeerTeach trainings, middle schoolers became demonstrably more effective tutors, particularly when they first mastered the math content…the benefits of tutoring may be within every child’s grasp if we can harness the existing talent and ingenuity that abounds in every classroom.

Dr. Soren Rosier, CEO of PeerTeach

The superintendent of Cloverdale Unified School District, Betha Macclain, writes that PeerTeach could “revolutionize how K-12 educators structure learning. The cost is a small fraction of typical tutoring and it offers clear additional benefits, like cultivating students to be empathetic.”

The principal at Miwok Elementary School – Mary Reynolds – writes that, “Last year I saw so many 
ways that students and teachers benefited [from PeerTeach]. Students’ confidence in mathematics increased along with levels of engagement and perseverance. We saw positive learning outcomes 
in both conceptual and procedural mathematics.”

One-third of college freshmen drop out and many more do not graduate on time. Many college students’ ability to pass or fail their courses and ultimately earn their degree has little to do with their ability to learn 
and master concepts or demonstrate their academic competency.

Instead, they fail primarily due to administrative and bureaucratic complexities around planning classes and advising sessions. Legacy resources that exist to help students plan their semester are often disjointed, with a wide array of websites, course catalogs, and third-party apps clouding the experience and sending students in countless different – and often competing – directions.

For today’s busy and often overwhelmed students, this disjointedness can quickly lead to confusion, frustration, needless time spent on extra courses, and even outright failure. This disorganization also hurts institutions. A subpar student experience yields wasted advising sessions, poor return-on-nvestment for the wide array of navigational tools adopted, lower student success rates and, subsequently, diminished funding. All of this comes at the cost of billions of dollars to institutions.

Stellic gives college students their power back by allowing them to navigate and control their higher education experience. Stellic streamlines the higher education navigational experience, capturing and organizing the student experience in a holistic, cloud-based platform that aggregates all critical information on course offerings, student data, graduation requirements, and skills and outcomes, to help them organize their journey.

“It made it easy to find and save information in a format that will enable me to start the conversation about what I am hoping to achieve with my studies,” explained a student Stellic user at the University of Newcastle in Australia.

Stellic is user-centric, integrating all audit, planning, and advising tools into a single platform and negating the need for clunky, multi-platform visits. Students using Stellic have access to a semester scheduler, which lets them plan not only courses, but also internships and co-curricular activities. Their advisor-student communications are integrated, and recommendations are provided for their unique course and pathway needs. Built-in analytics give students and their institution insights into performance, as well as notifications about areas of risk.

“When I saw the UI and that you can drag and drop, I was impressed. Stellic is clean, clear, and has quality, student-facing features.”

Jay Street, Student Data Management Specialist, The Master’s University

The transformative effects of Stellic are evident when looking across institutions that have adopted it to streamline their student experience.

Sweet Briar College – a private, women’s liberal arts college in Virginia – offers one such example. When Sweet Briar’s new registrar was tasked with modernizing a number of paper-based processes, he took stock of existing forms and processes. He identified an urgent need for a digital solution to enable degree auditing capabilities, among other registrar functions. He and his team specifically wanted a student-friendly solution that was intuitive and that could be seamlessly integrated without the need for a steep technology learning curve or adoption time.

Sweet Briar chose to adopt Stellic in October, 2021. The impacts of the adoption were clear almost immediately for faculty, students and the registrar’s office. They are now able to make changes to audits in 10 minutes or less, eliminating the need to manually update forms and reducing confusion among students and faculty when curriculum is changed. In a case study, they write that, “A modern degree audit has brought radical transparency about student progress to [the registrar’s] office, and provided a host of data from which they can make informed decisions. They now have clear visibility into student plans and progress, courses, selections and programs. With reporting and analytics tools at their disposal, their office is able to make strategic use of this data…” 

Faculty at Sweet Briar are able to communicate with advisees and each other directly in Stellic, negating the need for email as the sole method of communication between academic units and allowing for more direct visibility into student progress. To-date, 94% of Sweet Briar faculty are using Stellic. A vast majority (91%) of Sweet Briar students now use Stellic to track their degree progress in real time, as well as map degree routes and discuss plans with faculty advisors. By March of 2022, all of Sweet Briar’s degree audits, course information, and student records were fully housed in Stellic, and the transition away from manual processes was complete.

At Colorado College – a private, liberal arts college in Colorado Springs, staff were able to shift their entire approach to advising – from a clunky and fragmented view of the student lifecycle, to one that streamlines past, present and future aspects of student success – using Stellic. 

“Colorado College saw Stellic as a way to balance student independence with proactive advising, while giving students and staff a modern interface with which they could access all relevant student information in one place,” their case study explains. 

Colorado College opted to use Stellic to accommodate its block plan structure while  increasing transparency into students’ backgrounds, schedules, progress, goals and interests at key points in the advising lifecycle. 

The result? Better opportunities to reach all students who need help, breaking the self-fulfilling success advantage that only benefits those who are already most likely to ask for help. Within a year of adoption, Colorado College was able to reach 92% of first-year students using Stellic, and their overall student engagement with academic planning is at 94%. Through Stellic, advisors and students alike are freed up to focus on planning for the future, instead of being hampered by worries about the various, disparate elements of their student experience. 
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“I noticed that when I was in meetings with my advisor, we could spend more time talking about career paths, the future, and what made sense for me from a professional standpoint,” shared a Colorado College Student.

EE: My name is Evette Ellis. I’m the Co-Founder and new Chief People Officer at ChargerHelp!. My entire professional history has been in workforce development. My focus at ChargerHelp! is everything from recruitment to training, hiring, and also retention – which is something that people forget about all the time. I’m really focused on our people and culture. I like to say I’m now responsible for making sure the guts of ChargerHelp! reflect our beautiful brand… that the inside is just as healthy as the business.

EE: ChargerHelp! a national, dedicated operations and maintenance service provider that offers electronic vehicle (EV) charging to our customers. In short, ChargerHelp! is a lot of things, but mainly we fix broken electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE). We do that through a field service platform that we’ve built called Empower. We call it that because it empowers our field technicians to be able to diagnose and repair the charging stations. As we think about the EV infrastructure for the whole country, we really have to get on top of being able to predict what’s going to go wrong and when. We need EV to be efficient and work well to encourage people to even buy electric vehicles to begin with. We’ve done projects with customers like Tesla, ABB, EV BOX, BLINK, Flo, Tritium, and Shell Recharge, to name a few.

We also have a workforce development arm within ChargerHelp! because we knew we needed to focus on hiring equitably, and being inclusive, but we also knew that that wasn’t necessarily the lay of the clean energy landscape at the time. In short, we want to ensure that good opportunities and career spaces exist for all people who would benefit from clean energy jobs, but also because we know that being inclusive will ultimately benefit the entire sector.

EE: I worked for the Department of Labor Job Corps program for about 10 years. I was doing some contract work at LA CleanTech Incubator where I was doing career coaching and helping them to build out their workforce development fellowships. That’s where I met my co-founder Kameale Terry. I come from a 9-5 background where we work, collect our paycheck and go about our business… so entrepreneurship was rather new to me. But figuring out how to get good talent placed was what I did very well. That was my role at first – figuring out how we recruit a diverse, inclusive, trained pool of candidates. And, if they don’t exist, how do we create space to teach and to train them? It was very inspiring to me. I knew deep down that that diverse talent pool probably didn’t exist so I was interested in what it would take to create it. We had the best ingredients: curriculum and experience. We put those together and made magic.

Initially we hired 20 technicians from all over the country. Over the last two years, they have earned over twenty one certifications and are now our very best technicians… the most trained techs in the country. As to why we had to start from ground zero? Part of that is the industry just had not arrived when it came to training. And their learning curve was different. This was their first exposure to this industry. When we recruit, we are now asking things like, “Hey, have you worked in IT? Have you worked in manufacturing or field service?” Those backgrounds are very valuable. So, we’re learning that there are steps and levels. I think it’s really great because it shows the transition to clean energy – meaning there are people who are already  in these spaces who can now transition their skill sets into clean energy.

CK: My name is Catalina Kaiyoorawongs. I’m the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of LoanSense. When I was in high school, my mom was able to close on her first house only because my grandfather was a realtor and gave all the commissions back to my mom. The house I’m sitting in today is that same house. Fast forward to college; I got a scholarship to attend Barnard College in NYC. One day, my dad called me and told me he was living in a homeless shelter. I remember having an overwhelming sense of guilt because even though I had a scholarship to college, the one thing it didn’t cover was room and board, and that’s why I took out a lot of student loans for undergrad. Also, I had been sending my dad money when he asked for it, but the last time he asked, I just couldn’t. So I felt guilty because I was waking up in a dorm while my dad was living in a homeless shelter.

[As an adult] I was turned down for my first mortgage in 2015. I went to three different lenders and the first two never got back to me, but the third one said, “Pay down your student loans and come back later.” I had so many questions. “How much will this house be worth by the time I pay down my student loans?” “How long will I need to eat ramen in order to pay my loans?” So, I started researching the rules and I found out that instead of just paying off the whole student loan, I could just change my student loan plan to be able to have more disposable income, and then I would be able to close on a house.

I was able to close on my first house 45 days later. And that’s when I realized there's a huge market education gap. Lenders don’t know anything about student loans and they don’t know what to tell borrowers. They’re often needlessly turning down loan requests from people with student loans who could actually qualify for a mortgage by adjusting borrowers’ student loan payments to what they can afford to pay.

CK: LoanSense gives lenders the data they need to understand how people with student loans qualify for a mortgage, while giving the borrowers the power to adjust down their student loans so they can qualify and close on a mortgage. We’re empowering moderate income Americans – people earning under six figures – by helping them to understand their student loan reduction potential and how much more house they can qualify for.

So, let’s say you have a student loan with a hundred thousand dollar balance and a lender says, “Ok, around $1,000 is used towards calculating your debt-to-income ratio”. We tell them, “Actually, no. Based on [various factors], the government says their payment would only be $300. So don’t count $1,000 towards their payment, count $300. Now they can use that $700 extra for the mortgage and to give them a boost in purchasing power.” We then help the borrower get student loan forgiveness on the amount they do not pay. We do not just extend the payment or add interest.

We help customers enroll their student loan paperwork and educate them using our platform. The best time to educate someone and get them to act is when they’re about to be told they can’t do something. It’s real-time education. We give them free student loan plan analysis and we educate them on the long-term impacts of enrolling into student loan plans, how to manage it, how much forgiveness there is, and about the impact of things like marriage or tax filing status on future payments. Otherwise, borrowers are using Google to try and figure it all out.

As for why lenders are interested in this? Otherwise they are needlessly turning down potential loans and losing money in the process. They’re unnecessarily missing out on the opportunity to provide loans to people, and they can’t really afford to do that in this market where we have an affordability crisis in housing.

CK: I never realized, until I started LoanSense, why I care so much about this problem. Housing stability is so important, and I understand it because I grew up in constant transition without it. It’s such a pervasive problem for so much of America. The inability to get a loan is a huge barrier that impacts my generation. Student loans are the only liability item that can be adjusted through government programs. When COVID hit, the payment pause negatively impacted the way lenders recognized student loans, so this was a bit of a “save the day” moment and it was a good time for us to launch.

The majority of customers who come to us are women, and there are a lot of customers with disproportionate debt-to-income ratios, and it’s really sad. We’re also helping people of color who hold master’s degrees but are earning significantly less, relative to their debt. [Loan denial is] systematically happening to Black Americans because of credit and debt-to-income issues.

This issue even happens to attorneys! Even though they are supposed to be less fearful of policies and may have higher incomes, they have had to take out so much debt relative to others.  I liken it to a spider mentality… it’s similar to my story, where you’re like, “Wait, I’m following a script here. I didn’t know I was going to be excluded or that getting an education was somehow going to exclude me from buying a house. This can’t be, right? What are my options?” The education part of this is so necessary.