Episode 106: Matching You With Your Dream College With David Hurwitt, Founder and CEO at Troove
Dave Hurwitt is an innovator. Over the course of his career, he’s led the development and launch of new products and services – from toothpicks to wind turbines – that have generated well over $1 billion in sales.
If you have a large, front loading washing machine in your house, that was Dave and his team at Whirlpool. They re-envisioned the traditional, small European washer for the US market and took front loaders from 1% of the market to over 50% today, saving billions of dollars in electricity and water consumption in the process.
Dave has lived and worked around the world, and is now based in Burlington Vermont with his wife and two Golden Retrievers. Their 3 “kids” have now graduated from college, but it was his experience with them on their college journeys that started his innovator’s brain cranking on what became Troove.
Having worked in admissions through grad school, he was amazed by how little technology and the internet had impacted the college search and admissions process. And even more, he was dismayed to discover how often students were transferring or dropping out altogether.
In early 2020, this led directly to his founding Troove, a 2-sided, AI powered platform to help students discover their passions, people, and place based on the real experiences of recent alumni and current higher education students.
Even with Colleges having so much information, why do they provide no actionable intelligence to themselves?
There is actually a fair amount of technology that enrollment officers and admissions officers are using today in order to target people who will apply and to drive application numbers because that is part of the issue in that most schools from a management structure, the responsibility for creating new enrollment and new net tuition. revenue lies in the enrollment office. What happens downstream once they’ ’re on campus is no longer the responsibility of most admissions. The people they bring in are good people as they do not want to bring the wrong people and they are trying their best but the focus had become somewhat myopically on enrollment statistics. They want students to fill in the seats. They get the tuition revenue that way. The gross tuition minus the discount offered to the student as an inducement to come. Those are the two key performance indicators that most enrollment people are focused on. With Troove, one of the things they do is actually say the problem is not getting into college but the problem is getting out of college. With the problem of getting into college societally, we tend to think that the hardest thing about American college is getting into an ivy league school like Harvard. The 80, 20 rules apply to those colleges because there are 20 schools that dominate 80% of the attention that we all think of about college. The national average acceptance rate is about 75%, so the students are getting into most of the schools where they apply. The national four-year graduation rate is 45%. It is twice as hard to get out as it is to get in and so from Trooves perspective that is the problem they want to solve. Enrollment officers are trying to solve the wrong problem. They are focused on just getting students to apply and how to get them enrolled. From there they leave the rest of the school to solve the other part. One of the insights that Troove is bringing is to focus on the end result.
How Troove gets the students’ DNA out there and prospects it in the market?
In the past we had students apply to colleges and the students would write to the colleges saying they would love to come o their school and let them know what they have studied and also show them their teachers’ recommendations and share a little bit about themselves. That is essentially what students are doing today and over time, every school creates its own pool of applicants. This creates an ocean of applicants that eventually gets divided into many different little pools which is highly inefficient. If you think about the amount of money that is being wasted and the lack of intelligence that is applied to what the school knows about the student and what the student knows about the school. This is all built on 17th-century thinking in technology. Part of the approach that Troove is taking is to step back from this and day networking effect of being able to get your unique DNA out there to the point where every prospect in the market. There are 3.7 million high school seniors in the US and another 1 million students outside the US who want to come to the US. There are a very large set of students but most schools are small. They are 1,000 to 2,000 students and they might receive 3,000 to 5,000 applications. 5,000 applications out of nearly 5 million prospective students is a very tiny slice of the market. Everyone is operating from these microscopic slices where if there was a new design to the system that would start from scratch. They would not fish in the pond but the whole ocean and find a way to assess all of the students against Trooves DNA so that at the start of the admissions process, students can find the schools where they have the highest probability of coming, staying, succeeding, and not just for graduation success but to actually become an engaged alum.
Defining what the best school for the student is?
The phrase that gets heard a lot is “I’m just trying to find my people”. Students try to do this both inside and outside of the classroom. This idea could also be challenged as a fundamentally qualitative exercise. For example, when talking about Spotify, the data science that defines the algorithm that says when a user has a listening pattern of these songs and had given a thumbs up on the following songs, people who have thumbed up one song have also liked this other song. So they will put in other songs to see how the user that is listening will like or dislike the song. That is a very data-driven quantitative process. Since there are large pools of experienced users at school called graduates, they are able to mine the data in a very quantitative way and say that from a social culture perspective and an academic culture perspective, you are over-indexing as a learner and as a community member who would enjoy the same set of conditions. When you look at the data about what enrollment officers pay attention to, it is data around academic aptitude such as GPA, transcript depth, and test scores. These elements are what enrollment offices will tell you they rely on most in their decision-making process. Troove is trying to introduce a similar GPA data-driven metric on social culture fit based on large sample sizes and data science and AI in order to find the students who would thrive in your culture. When the process started, some industrial psychologists said they are looking for psychological safety. What Troove is looking for is a set of conditions where students when in the classroom and when out of the classroom as community members to say that they have found their people. and that they are comfortable and feel good. They have the data science and data sets available to establish the link and then do it again at the front of the process so the students can say upfront say, let me see if I can find the schools where I’m going to be comfortable and get to know them because those are the best schools that will make the best version of me.
Contact David Hurwitt
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davehurwitt
Learn more about Troove
Website: https://www.troove.me
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/trooveme
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Trooveme
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/troove.me
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@trooveit
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