July 18, 2017
The Voqal Education Venture Fund is proud to announce its investment in and partnership with GetSet Learning.
GetSet is a social networking platform that strategically connects students to peers who have successfully faced similar obstacles with the goal of improving postsecondary retention and persistence. The technology blends influential peer advice with proven behavioral techniques for developing a growth mindset, grit, resilience and self-regulation.
The cultivation of strong non-cognitive skills has been found to be closely tied to several positive outcomes, including a decrease in the degree completion gap between disadvantaged youth and their more affluent peers. Recent data show that approximately 90 percent of lower-income, first-generation students do not graduate postsecondary on time (within four years for community college and six for university/college). Yet, there has been increasingly clear evidence that focusing on targeted development of non-cognitive traits significantly improves these completion rates, most notably regarding several critical traits: grit (persistence), resilience, self-efficacy and growth mindset. Actively improving these traits enhances retention and leads to better on time completion rates.
GetSet is an innovative approach to cultivating these critical non-cognitive skills in a postsecondary setting with the goal of improving timely completion by preventing dropouts. Using a research-based metacognitive skill development framework, GetSet helps students model themselves after relatable peers. GetSet accomplishes this through a suite of software that allows for a rich understanding of a school’s student body, the identification of students at-risk of leaving school, professional development for staff to foster growth mindset development and a safe space for students to interact about challenges they face.
The core of GetSet’s impact is the student community. GetSet calls this a “social network with purpose” — a platform for students to support each other by sharing stories of overcoming adversity. Students are able to connect with solutions to their issues from successful classmates facing similar challenges. This method of positive peer influence and simple nudges based on behavioral science has been shown to help first generation and other disadvantaged students succeed in school.
GetSet is an extremely promising early-stage company focused on the goal of college persistence and completion for disadvantaged students with an elegant and proven solution to this problem. GetSet is taking a scale approach using technology to solve a vexing opportunity gap and early results demonstrate that it is making strong progress. Voqal’s Education Venture Fund is excited to partner with GetSet as it helps build persistence and increase postsecondary completion.
Learn more about the Education Venture Fund here.