Dive Brief:

• Advisory Board Company has acquired GradesFirst, a startup company that helps colleges and universities improve their student retention and graduation rates by engaging their so-called “at-risk” students.
• GradesFirst, based in Alabama, will combine with the higher education division of Advisory Board Company, called Education Advisory Board, to create the first “one-stop student success solution," according to DC Inno.
• The new acquisition will allow for GradesFirst’s case management and communication systems to be paired with the predictive analytics of Education Advisory Board.

Dive Insight:

According to Advisory Board’s chief executive, Robert Musslewhite, buying GradesFirst gives Advisory Board the ability to serve postsecondary students throughout the student lifecycle, from finding a college to graduating on time to landing a job and staying engaged as an alumnus. The DC-based Advisory Board says that the platform is the first that provides student advisors with the ability to predict which students are in danger of dropping out, connect those students to needed resources, and then evaluate how effective those resources are.

This is another notable ed acquisition for the Advisory Board, which in December acquired leading higher education student engagement and enrollment management solutions provider Royall & Company. As we noted then, the Advisory Board Company traditionally operated in the healthcare space, making its ed expansion all the more interesting.