Complete College America today announced the recipients of the organization’s 2017 Seal of Approval. The award, established in 2016, recognizes software tools that most effectively promote college completion and student success through alignment with CCA’s Game Changer strategies. This year’s winners are EAB Navigate and Starfish by Hobsons.
For 2017, the award program evaluated vendors and their software solutions for functionality that supports timely pathways to completion and the use of informed choice and proactive advising. This includes the ability to default register students onto their chosen academic maps, easy integration of the registration process and software, and the mechanisms for ongoing monitoring and reporting when students get off track.
Both recipients met the standards established by CCA’s Seal of Approval Advisory Board – a blue-ribbon panel of top technologists and higher education leaders. The board awarded the Seal of Approval based on a defined set of best practices as well as a robust evaluation of effective implementations and aspirational standards.
EAB Navigate enables colleges to achieve critical goals of the Guided Pathways model with a single, comprehensive platform. Through the platform, students have access to guided onboarding to clarify paths, end goals and smart academic planning to help choose and enter a pathway; advisors benefit from 360-degree advisor dashboards to help students stay on path; and senior leaders can make data-driven decisions based on actionable administrator views to ensure all student succeed. EAB Navigate empowers students to make informed choices with proactive advising support when needed – a balance that historically has been difficult to achieve. This is the second year in a row that EAB has won this prestigious award.
Starfish by Hobsons helps institution scale student success, support and retention initiatives to enable students to engage more effectively with the campus community and achieve their academic goals. Starfish offers solutions to support the CCA completion agenda through early alerts and student tracking, online appointment scheduling and case management, personalized degree-based roadmaps to graduation and analytics reporting and predictive modeling.
“We know that far too many college students wander aimlessly through their academic experience, racking up excess credits and semesters, taking on additional student loan debt, and ultimately graduating late, if at all,” said Complete College America president Tom Sugar. “The Seal of Approval seeks to recognize those software providers that are tackling these challenges head on, providing structural changes, new systems and the use of behavioral economics to put students on a path to graduation.”
The award recipients will be recognized as part of Complete College America’s 2017 Annual Convening in New Orleans, Louisiana on November 30th. The event will also include demos from the winning software providers and a facilitated session with the Advisory Board to describe required functionality for the 2018 program.
