InsideTrack turns 25 this year, and its newest report offers fresh evidence that a timely phone call can keep a student from leaving college. The nonprofit partners with colleges and universities to pair students with trained coaches. Those coaches reach out by phone, text and email, learn what stands between each learner and a degree, and help map a next step. Since 2001, the organization has coached more than 3.6 million people. Its latest findings, drawn from 39 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), show the results of that work for the students most likely to be overlooked.
Colleges pour their resources into recruitment and admissions, and families and governments follow with tuition, grants and loans, yet almost no institution assigns a person to notice when a student quietly stops attending. A tuition hold, a night shift that collides with a class schedule, or a financial aid form that nobody explained, can end an education as surely as a failing grade, and the student who walks away rarely announces it. That student leaves with the debt and without the degree, which is the worst outcome the system produces, and it is a civil rights problem because it falls hardest on Black, working-class and older Americans. Preventing that outcome costs far less than repairing it later, and it is also more just.
When InsideTrack began, its founders spent much of their time persuading skeptical campuses what coaching could possibly mean in higher education, since most people heard the word and pictured a football sideline. Ruth Bauer, who has served as the organization’s president for six years, told me that nobody asks for that explanation anymore. The work itself begins with listening.
A student who grumbles about a math professor may reveal, after a few gentle questions, that the real difficulty is having nowhere quiet to study. In the summer after George Floyd’s murder, according to Bauer, students phoned their coaches to say they were scared on campus, and the coaches helped them talk it through.
HBCUs have practiced this kind of attention since their founding, treating each student’s presence as an achievement worth protecting. A century and a half of scarcity, however, has limited how many staff they can assign to follow each student through a semester, and the shortage remains a daily fact.
InsideTrack’s newest report, “Empowering Student Momentum at HBCUs” released in August, follows a five-year initiative across 39 historically Black colleges and universities that reached nearly 44,000 prospective, enrolled and stopped-out learners between fall 2021 and spring 2026. Enrolled students who met with a coach stayed from fall to spring at a rate of 90.4 percent, compared with 82.4 percent for those who did not. Of the students who had stopped out, 1,343 came back, a re-enrollment rate of 6.9 percent that is roughly two and a half times the national average of 2.7 percent, and more than 2,300 supported students have since earned degrees, according to National Student Clearinghouse data.
Participating institutions saw an estimated $26.9 million in recovered and retained tuition revenue. A randomized study published in 2014 by researchers Eric Bettinger and Rachel Baker found that students assigned by lottery to InsideTrack coaches were roughly 15 percent more likely to be enrolled a year after coaching ended.
Adult learners made up nearly 40 percent of the students coached in the initiative, and Bauer described the range of what students face with an image of terrain.
“There are some students that have mountains in front of them, where others have a gravel pathway,” she said. “We all have obstacles, but we want to help those students over the mountains.”
She credits InsideTrack's conversion to a nonprofit six years ago with allowing it to serve campuses that could never have afforded so labor-intensive a service, and a companion program is now training 233 staff members and leaders at 21 HBCUs to coach students on their own, so that the skill stays on campus when outside funding ends. The organization is also preparing a new philanthropic fund that would follow HBCU students through all four years, with added support for those who need another semester, and it hopes to reach more than half of the nation's HBCUs.
A quarter century is a long time for a single idea to hold its shape in a sector that chases fashions, and InsideTrack’s endurance suggests the idea was sound from the start. The country has asked its Black colleges to educate first-generation students, working parents and returning adults with a fraction of the resources that wealthier institutions enjoy, and it now has evidence that a well-timed phone call can help those students reach the finish line.
Anyone who cares about the debt crisis and the future of these institutions should treat that evidence as a mandate to fund the call.
Dr. Jamal Watson is a higher education consultant, professor and associate dean of Graduate Studies at Trinity Washington University and the author of this bi-weekly column. Watson is the former executive editor of Diverse: Issues In Higher Education (now The EDU Ledger) and is the author of The Student Debt Crisis: America’s Moral Urgency (Broadleaf Books, 2025).
