UPchieve: Free Online Tutoring & College Counseling

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] Justin Baeder:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Allie Murray. Allie is the founder and executive director of Upchieve. She is also a proud Latina, math nerd, and community college grad. And after earning an associate's degree, Allie transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated summa cum laude with a degree in mathematics. Following Penn, Allie worked on the trading floor at JPMorgan for two years before leaving to commit to Upchieve full-time. Her personal experience as a low-income student drives her to fight for educational equity and work towards a world in which all students have an equal opportunity to achieve upward mobility.

[00:46]

To date, Upchieve has provided free tutoring to over 40,000 students nationwide and matched nearly 300,000 tutoring requests with almost 50,000 volunteers. For her work at Upchieve, Allie has been featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in education and honored as a Roddenberry Fellow.

[01:03] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[01:06] Justin Baeder:

Allie, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[01:08] Aly Murray:

Thank you, Justin. It's great to be here.

[01:09] Justin Baeder:

Well, I'm excited to speak with you because you've got quite an interesting personal story and quite an interesting project going, a substantial nonprofit organization supporting students. Tell us a little bit about your, and we mentioned a little bit of this in the bio, but tell us a little bit about your educational journey and how that led to where things are now with Upchieve.

[01:27] Aly Murray:

Absolutely. Yeah. So like many low-income students in the United States, I attended Title I public schools pretty much my whole life. And I also was raised by a single mom who was an immigrant to the United States from Cuba. And kind of the combination of those factors meant that I often didn't have access to the support that I felt I needed to excel and to do the best I could Whether it was in my school or, you know, late at night in my home, if I was stuck on something, I didn't know where I could go for help. And I didn't feel I had enough support available.

[02:01]

And that lack of support, you know, I'm lucky that I was always pretty good at math, actually. So I didn't necessarily need math tutoring, which a lot of students in our country do. But I really needed the help when it came time to apply to college and try to navigate that process. And without that support, I didn't know what I was doing. Even though I was a straight A student, I enrolled directly at my local community college. And from there, it took me six years to transfer and earn a bachelor's degree.

[02:29]

And so It wasn't an easy journey. By any means, at one point, I almost gave up. And to me, the thing that's crazy about that is that, again, I was a high-achieving student who knew I wanted to go to college, and it was still so hard for me to make it to that finish line. And so those experiences, struggling as a student to access support, are a big part of what inspired me to start UpChief.

[02:51] Justin Baeder:

Well, and I think everybody understands the idea of tutoring, and I want to get back to that in just a moment. But let's talk about the college counseling angle, because college is, gosh, a difficult system to navigate, to figure out. What are some of the big hurdles in getting to college and getting to the best college possible? This is kind of a competitive world that affluent parents start planning years and years ahead. how to navigate. And a lot of students get to that point and they don't know what to do.

[03:19]

So take us into kind of the challenge there, especially for first generation college students.

[03:24] Aly Murray:

Absolutely. And I always say that if you have personally applied to college or if you've helped somebody apply to college recently, you know that it is a very complicated process. And it's kind of crazy to imagine a student navigating it on their own without the support of a school counselor or a parent. And I think that the reason, one thing that's actually very unique about even the tutoring side of what we do is that we've approached everything from this angle of how do we solve the problem of getting more, how do we get more low-income students to enroll in college? as a pathway to upward mobility. And if you approach even tutoring with that angle of we wanna get more low-income students into college, you end up with a very different program.

[04:04]

So one of the things that most people don't know about the reason that gap exists is a lot of it has to do with academics. There's a really great report by the Brookings Institute where they found that if you control for differences in measures of academic preparation between low-income and high-income students, over 70% of the gap in college enrollment disappears. And if you look at just academic GPA alone, that's over 50% of the gap disappears. And so there's a lot of work to be done to help low-income students get into college just by helping them get better grades. And I think it makes a lot of sense because if you're a student that doesn't get good grades in school, you're gonna think you're bad at school. And why would you wanna go do more school after school if you think you're not good at school?

[04:56]

And so to me, it's always been pretty self-explanatory that we have to help students get better grades if we want them to enroll in college.

[05:04] Justin Baeder:

I wanted to ask as just kind of a side note here, your opinion on the idea of college for all, because I think there's kind of a growing sentiment in our society that maybe we push that too far and maybe college is not the very best thing for everybody. We want everybody to have options. We want everybody to have good growth and development and career opportunities. Do you think we push too hard maybe over the last 20 years in the direction of college for absolutely every single person?

[05:29] Aly Murray:

I don't actually. So what I would say is college is not the right path for every single student. I do believe that it's not the right path for every student, but it is one of the most reliable pathways to upward mobility in the United States today. And one thing that, one fact that a lot of people actually don't know who are, you know, who tout this like, oh, not every kid needs to go to college. What about all that debt? What if they drop out and then they just have debt?

[05:54]

I hear that argument all the time, but it's actually unfounded. So there's research that shows if you take even a single college class, even if you drop out, you will make way more over the course of your lifetime. So even the college dropouts make more money. And so they make more than the amount of debt that they accrue in the process of trying to go to college. And obviously a lot, you know, some of those students are succeeding in getting the degree as well. And so I do firmly believe that for the majority of students, enrolling in college is a really strong first step on that pathway to achieving upward mobility.

[06:28] Justin Baeder:

I appreciate your perspective there because yeah, it's not necessarily an all or nothing. Certainly there's a huge benefit to actually graduating and getting the degree, but you're saying the benefits are not zero for starting, for trying, for making an effort.

[06:40] Aly Murray:

Absolutely.

[06:41] Justin Baeder:

What are some steps that people typically get hung up on or need help with when it comes to navigating college?

[06:48] Aly Murray:

Yeah, I think that for a lot of students, they know that applying to college is a valuable thing. A lot of students do understand that there are jobs, like, actually, I'll take a step back. I think that if you ask just about any student in the United States, low-income student or otherwise, what are their goals for their life, getting a good job, a job that pays well and allows them to live the kind of life they want to live is probably top of the list, vast majority of students. And I do think that a lot of students understand that going to college can help unlock some of those jobs. But the actual process of applying to college is pretty complicated. You need to understand all of the different types of colleges that are out there and where you might be a good fit.

[07:35]

You need to know how many schools does it take to get into a good school. You might be a straight A student, but if you only apply to Harvard, you're probably not getting into Harvard and you might not go to any college as a result. And so I think understanding the types of schools that are out there, what are the pros and cons of those different schools, which schools might be most affordable for you, because I do think that the financial side is a consideration, of course. Those are some of the things that students may not understand if they're not getting that advice. And simply understanding the timeline and making a plan to execute on it. is a surprisingly large roadblock.

[08:10]

A lot of students may not realize that they have to take the SAT by a certain date, or they have to fill out the FAFSA by a certain date. And so that kind of information absolutely matters. Going back to that Brookings Institute report, I said 70% is due to academics, but I think there's 30% that isn't, right? Even kids that have identical academics, low-income students enroll at lower rates. And I think a lot of it is Either they are missing some sort of information about why they should go to college or how they actually go about applying to college.

[08:40] Justin Baeder:

Yeah, that seems like a huge opportunity because we're talking specifically about the group of students who is academically qualified. They are ready. They have the skills. They have the knowledge. They just need to get there and figure out how to get there. I was smiling a little bit when you were talking about only applying to Harvard because I actually had a high school classmate who did that.

[08:56]

She only applied to Harvard and she did not get in. And then we have a lot of students, on the other hand, who I think I've heard this problem described as under matching, where because maybe they're a first generation applicant, they don't apply to any good schools. They only apply to community college. They don't think they have a chance or they don't think they can afford some universities that actually may be very eager to accept them and have very generous financial aid. So it sounds like there is money out there, especially for low income students. It sounds like there is opportunity out there.

[09:28]

Talk to us a little bit about that.

[09:29] Aly Murray:

Yeah, and I'm laughing at your story because I'm also one of those students that Harvard was the one selective college that I had heard of. And so even looking at my own first list of schools that I applied to, I applied to Harvard. I applied to a local private school that I just knew because it was nearby. And I applied to the state school, the community college. And so I didn't apply to a lot of schools. I didn't get into Harvard.

[09:54]

I did get into the private school, but the private school had bad financial aid. It wasn't even a particularly selective school. And so this is an example of how students can totally mess up the list of colleges that they end up applying to. I do think under-matching is a big problem. And not even just under-matching, but under-enrolling One of the things we started collecting data on from the students that use Upchieve is where did you apply? Where did you get into?

[10:21]

And then where did you ultimately decide to enroll? And I think a lot of students don't know that going to a more selective college, even if it costs more money may be worth it in the long run, because there's a strong correlation between the selectivity of the college that you attend and your lifetime earnings and your chances of achieving economic upward mobility. So we do think that students need to be applying to schools that are appropriately matched. They should go to the most selective college they can go to, assuming that the financials work out.

[10:53] Justin Baeder:

So Allie, looking at your tutoring model and looking at some of the discourse that I hear about high impact tutoring, your model does seem different. What are some of the differences about how you approach tutoring with students and what's some of the intention behind that?

[11:08] Aly Murray:

Absolutely, we are really different than the model that's typically touted as high impact and it's intentional. So I mentioned earlier that we approach even the tutoring side of what we do with the goal of college access. We want more low-income students to enroll in college. And if you're designing a tutoring program for that goal, your tutoring program is going to look really different. One of the first big differences is that we believe that schools should be trying to provide tutoring in all subjects. That includes science and social studies.

[11:39]

It's not just math and English because ultimately students' grades in all their classes matter, right? That makes up their academic GPA. and their self-identity. Maybe they're doing okay in math and English, but they can't seem to pass any of their science classes. That is a student who is not going to enroll in college. And so absolutely students need tutoring in all subjects.

[11:58]

Obviously, it can be hard to find people that can do tutoring in all the different subjects. And so oftentimes schools with different models of tutoring may run into staffing or cost issues if they're trying to offer it in all subjects. The second big difference for us is we really believe that all of the students in your school should have access to tutoring and you should be focused on driving utilization of not just your lowest achieving students. In fact, we really see the place with the most leverage or opportunity as the middle majority of students. We call it like the middle 50% of students because those are students that they're not so far behind in that they need really intensive tutoring and a massive investment to get them caught up, but they're also not already guaranteed to go to college. They're not your straight-A kids who, like, they're definitely going to college.

[12:47]

It doesn't matter what you do, right? And so we want to focus our energy. As a nonprofit, we're all about the outcomes. We want to see that our intervention got more students to enroll in college And so we like that middle majority. These are the students who, you know, they have a lot of B's. Maybe they have some C's or D's.

[13:04]

And if we could help them do better and build confidence, they'd be more motivated and more likely to enroll in college.

[13:11] Justin Baeder:

I love that because I think you're absolutely right. The tutoring that schools provide, especially intensive, high dosage, high impact, long-term tutoring is overwhelmingly focused on students who are below grade level, who maybe are struggling with basic reading, basic math, and is intended to help them get back on track with grade level content. It's not focused on, as you said, that middle 50% or the students who are probably going to do fine regardless, but there's huge opportunity with tutoring. that middle 50% to boost their achievement, to boost their prospects, and to boost their chances of thriving in college. So I love that. That's fabulous.

[13:47] Aly Murray:

And I admit that cost is probably, when people are listening to this, they're going to be like, well, that's totally unrealistic. I can barely afford to do tutoring for the 20 worst students in my school in math. So what are you talking about? And that's another reason why in designing our school and how we work with schools, we've known we had to keep it extremely low cost. And being able to utilize volunteers as tutors is one of the ways that we're able to make tutoring very low cost. What we've seen is that we're actually our, you know, our partnership model that we do with schools, it is a paid partnership model, but the cost works out to about $10 per student per year.

[14:26]

And so that is a price that it's not nothing. I know that budgets are always hard, especially hard right now. But I do think that that's something that a lot of schools can fit into their budget if they're going to see the results in terms of students' test scores, their confidence, and ultimately their chances of enrolling in college.

[14:44] Justin Baeder:

As you said, the utilization is one of the primary metrics. There are students using this to actually benefit, to get the help they need, and to make progress.

[14:51] Aly Murray:

Right. When we think about the leverage that an hour of tutoring can have, I actually think the common wisdom that we hear is that school is that school should be providing tutoring during the school day to make sure that students actually show up and get the tutoring. But I actually think that if a tutoring session is replacing something else, then it's automatically going to be less impactful, right? There's a counterfactual to consider. And so Any time that Upchieve gets a student to do a tutoring session outside of school, it's going to have a bigger impact than a tutoring session that had to replace something else during the school day. And so that's another thing that I think is kind of different about how we approach tutoring from what's typically touted as the high impact model.

[15:33]

One final thing on this is We have the research to back it up. So we do actually also have a formal third-party research study. It was conducted by Mathematica. It's an RCT. And they found that our tutoring, so long as we get students to do enough sessions, is just as effective as more traditional tutoring models. And in the study, we found that it was actually a smaller number of sessions than you'd expect.

[15:55]

So we were able to find measurable, a pretty large effect from just nine tutoring sessions. The treatment group students, the treatment group in the study, those students did an average of nine sessions and they improved their percentile rank on a national math assessment by nine percentile rank points. They also saw really large gains in confidence and motivation.

[16:17] Justin Baeder:

So Allie, tell us a little bit more about how your platform works to match students with someone who can advise them on getting into college and with tutoring as well.

[16:27] Aly Murray:

Absolutely. So the student experience is really simple. It's intentionally designed to be really simple. Students, when they log into their account, they can choose a subject that they want to get help in. So we'll see all the different subjects available. We cover tutoring for every core academic subject, math, English, science, and social studies.

[16:46]

for grades six through 12. So they could choose an academic subject they want tutoring in, or they could choose SAT or ACT prep, or they could choose one of our college counseling topics. And those include things like building your college list or writing your application essay, or even applying for financial aid. So they see all the things we can help with, they choose one, and we actually match them with one of our live volunteer tutors or college coaches in under five minutes via the app. And this is available 24-7. So they could be using it from their phone or their computer late at night in their home and within just a couple minutes be connected with a live human being that actually cares deeply about helping them and can help them with whatever challenges they're working on.

[17:32]

And so student experience is really simple.

[17:35] Justin Baeder:

I have to ask that. That sounds too good to be true. How do you recruit enough tutors and volunteers to help this many students? Because it's been tens of thousands, right?

[17:42] Aly Murray:

Right. Yeah. So we have had over 40,000 people sign up to volunteer with us. So not a small number of people. And the magic of it is that we're solving a problem for the volunteers as well. There are actually a lot of people that care deeply about education and but they can't make a commitment to go in person to a school and, you know, tutor a student every day from 12 to 3 p.m. for an entire school year.

[18:07]

And so we make it really easy for student or for volunteers to make a shorter, a smaller term, shorter term commitment to tutor students. So because we've made it so flexible and convenient to volunteer, we've had tens of thousands of people sign up to volunteer with us.

[18:23] Justin Baeder:

Let's talk a little bit more about the tutoring side. So students can choose a subject, they can get matched with a tutor very quickly, and they can get help 24-7 thanks to just the large number of tutors who have signed up for your platform. What do you see in terms of the kinds of things that students need help with? Are they asking for help long-term or do they just have a quick homework question? What kinds of requests do you get on the tutoring side?

[18:47] Aly Murray:

Yeah, so we get the whole gamut. We have students making requests for homework help, for sure. That's a big area. And I think that there's kind of a negative connotation around the homework help sometimes. But realistically, homework makes up a big part of students' grades, as well as their overall motivation. It's hard to be motivated if You go home every night and you get stuck on the homework and you don't have anyone that can help you.

[19:09]

Right. And so homework help is definitely a big part of what we're doing on the platform. But we can also help students with other things. So a student could come on and say, I have a test coming up and I want to study. Can you help me study? Can you help me come up with a plan to study?

[19:22]

Can you help me review these problems, etc. ? And so no matter what they come on and say, the tutors are kind of trained to be able to react in that moment to whatever the student wants to do in their session. We've also had students use it, you know, if they missed a day of school and they said, hey, you know, my teacher taught this topic and I missed this day of school. Can you go over it with me? And so there's a lot of different ways that students are using the tutoring on the platform.

[19:46] Justin Baeder:

Yeah, and I think that's so powerful, especially when the adults in their lives, including myself, I couldn't tutor my own kids on trigonometry. We forget the stuff that we learned in many of our high school classes because we haven't used it. So you're connecting kids who have detailed questions about topics that most adults have forgotten with adults who are still in the thick of it and passionate about helping. I think that's great. And it's worth pointing out that these are human beings that you're connecting. This is not an AI platform, right?

[20:14] Aly Murray:

Correct. And I love to emphasize that. I think that in today's, it's interesting, teachers and school administrators, all the educators that I talk to, they usually really like that it's not AI. I think there's a kind of an understanding that like, oh yeah, like a lot of our students would actually prefer to talk to a human if that's possible. But we actually also tested it. We did a research study that was funded by the Gates Foundation.

[20:38]

And we actually, for a while, gave students access to both human tutors and AI tutors on our platform. And we found that students just almost every single time chose the human tutor. So very few students were even remotely interested in the AI tutor if they knew that the human was available. So it was actually less than 3% of tutoring sessions were with the AI. for the students that were in that research study. And so it's very much true that students want that human connection too.

[21:04]

It's not just teachers and administrators pushing for it, but students also really value having a real live human being that's there, that's rooting for them and holding their hand every step of the way.

[21:16] Justin Baeder:

It's so powerful because we're seeing so much investment and so much innovation in AI tools. And I think a lot of people who care about education, but maybe are not part of education, are perplexed at why there's not the uptake. And to me, as a career educator, it makes a lot of sense that students would care about something if another person is involved, but would not care that much. I don't think most kids will do math for an AI. I think a lot of kids will do math for their teacher and will learn it from a human being. There's just something about that human connection that is so powerful.

[21:51] Aly Murray:

I totally agree with you, but we don't have enough research yet about even if we get kids to use AI or we force them to use it, which I'm not a huge fan of, if the results will even be the same, right? AI tutoring may be way less effective than human tutoring because one of the big kind of drivers of impact for tutoring is actually the motivational impact or the boost in students' confidence. That's why we actually see students do better in all their classes, even when they're only getting tutoring in one specific subject. And so I think that it's possible we lose some of those SEL benefits that come with really good tutoring if it's AI doing the tutoring.

[22:27] Justin Baeder:

Yeah, I think from my own experience using AI to learn things or to have, you know, just have it explain little things to me, you know, none of those topics have turned into something that I studied for nine weeks or 18 weeks or 36 weeks, an hour a day. I mean, there is no technology that can match that structure and that relationship that you get in a class with a real teacher and a curriculum and other students working for the same goals. And certainly getting some additional help from a tutor can only make that better. I think that's really powerful for schools to know that when given the choice, you said 97% of tutoring sessions were human, not AI. When given a side-by-side choice of one or the other, kids prefer to work with human beings.

[23:08] Aly Murray:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it is true that people are like puzzled and we're pouring all this money into trying to get kids to use the AI tools more. And I'm like, no, no. This is the wrong approach.

[23:18] Justin Baeder:

Let's talk a little bit more about the school side because our audience of school leaders and other educators may be very interested in how their students could benefit from some of what your platform offers. How do you work with schools and how do you make what you offer available to students through their schools?

[23:34] Aly Murray:

Yeah, great question. So I mentioned that Upcheed makes it easy for students to access that tutoring and college counseling 24-7. And we're actually free to any student that attends a Title I middle school or high school in the United States. That's how we started. We started with this kind of direct-to-student model, and it was great during COVID. We were able to serve a lot of students who needed our help.

[23:55]

But we were also observing that the students who signed up to use UpChief Online were searching, were actually Googling, free math tutoring, or I need help with my math homework. Those were really motivated kids, and we wanted to be able to reach more students, not just the most motivated students in a given school. And that's why we launched our partnership with schools. So we've been now for about four or five years working on a partnership model that is capable of driving higher student usage of our platform so that you see not just your most motivated students, but you'll see, you know, our average right now across our partners, over a third of the school students in a school are going to use Upsheave and use Upsheave multiple times on average using us you know, making multiple requests. And obviously anytime you have an out of school, Upchief is designed to be used outside of school, driving usage is really hard.

[24:47]

But the partnership model that we've built is entirely focused on driving high student usage because Upchief is already free, right? The only point of doing anything extra would be, well, can we get kids to use it more? So we only partner with Title I middle schools or high schools and also districts that have at least some Title I schools in them. And the way it works for schools, so there's a technical implementation side. We make it really easy for both your students and your teachers to, they don't have to create accounts. We'll do like the clever integration, right?

[25:14]

So they'll be able to log in right away. And both teachers and administrators can see all of the usage that's happening. So they'll be able to see individual students, how many hours of tutoring did they do and in what subjects? So you have that access to that data. That's kind of the technical side, but the stuff that really drives higher student usage is the work that our partnership managers do with our schools. So we actually send a partnership manager in person to every one of our partner schools and they do presentations to students.

[25:45]

They ideally would go class by class and so you get smaller groups and present to students about Upchieve. We're also beginning to pilot with sending alumni, having alumni students, students who can say, I use Upchieve and it had this impact on me to schools. And so that kind of message is really powerful for students to hear directly from Upchieve. And we've seen that has a huge result. Essentially, our partner schools that are doing in-person student presentations are and teacher professional development, which is another part of what we do, those schools have 11 times more students getting tutoring. So dramatically different than a school that says, oh, great, we know about this free resource.

[26:25]

We're gonna tell people about it. We're gonna give out some flyers. That's not enough to get students using the platform. But when we come in person, we do presentations, we train your teachers, that leads to a huge amount of additional usage. We're seeing, you know, with the teacher training, what we're seeing is that if a teacher doesn't have the opportunity to ask questions about, well, how does it work? I mean, what's going to happen if, like, are you going to help my kids cheat?

[26:50]

Like, what happens if they ask for help on the test that I sent them home with or whatever? So academic integrity, are the kids safe? All of these kinds of great questions, if they can't ask those questions directly, they won't tell students to use it. And that's another reason why the teacher professional development makes such a big difference.

[27:07] Justin Baeder:

Really explored those kind of last mile challenges that, you know, the resources have been out there. There are volunteers waiting to help, but actually getting students to use it is really where a lot of the work is. You figure that out with schools, and I think that's a great thing. Well, Ali, if people want to get in touch with your team and learn more about partnering with you, where's the best place for them to go online?

[27:28] Aly Murray:

upchief.org. It's pretty simple. U-P-C-H-I-E-V-E.org.

[27:33] Justin Baeder:

Allie Murray, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[27:36] Aly Murray:

Thank you so much. Great to chat.

[27:38] Announcer:

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