What growth hacking for schools and colleges actually means for your student
Last month I was leaning against the vending machine in the volunteer break room at Westside High, killing 10 minutes before my college application workshop shift, when I overheard our principal and the new enrollment director Mia talking by the coffee pot. The principal was twisting a rubber band around his wrist, saying the state cut our supplemental support budget again, and we had 120 incoming freshmen on the waitlist for free math tutoring with no way to hire two more part-time tutors. Mia sipped her coffee, nodded, and said, “No big deal. Let me try a growth hack for this.” I’d only ever heard the term “growth hacking” in podcast ads for startup apps, so I perked up. I stuck around after the meeting to ask her what on earth a growth hack had to do with high school tutoring.
A crumblin blueberry bagel sat on the counter next to the coffee pot, my phone buzzed with a text from my oldest asking me to pick up extra laundry detergent on the way home, so it was just an ordinary Tuesday. Mia explained that for education institutions, growth hacking isn’t about tricking more students into enrolling to pad tuition numbers, like a lot of people assume. It’s just testing small, low-cost changes to fix big, annoying problems that no one has the budget to solve the “official” way.
For the math tutoring waitlist, her idea was simpler than I expected. She reached out to the education department at our local community college, where all honor students need 20 hours of classroom experience to graduate with their teaching degree. She didn’t ask for a donation or a formal partnership – just sent an email to the department secretary asking if any students wanted 30-minute weekly tutoring slots that counted toward their hours. Then the real tweak, the thing that made it work instead of falling apart: instead of scheduling tutoring after school, when most high schoolers have sports or jobs and most college students have evening classes, she opened slots between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. That’s when most high schoolers have a free period or lunch break, and most college students have a gap between their morning and afternoon lectures. It didn’t cost the district anything except $50 a month for a Zoom Pro account, which our PTA covered in 24 hours from our annual bake sale profit.
I got roped into tracking sign-ins and check-ins for the first month, so I saw how it went firsthand. 112 of the 120 waitlisted kids got matched within two weeks. I talked to Javi, a 15-year-old freshman who’d failed 8th grade math and was on the waitlist for three months before this. His tutor was a 20-year-old second-year education student named Marcus who’d also failed a middle school math class and was a first-gen college student. Javi told me Marcus didn’t make him feel stupid for forgetting how to factor polynomials, because he still wrote his formulas on a note card during tests too. By the end of the first semester, Javi pulled his grade up from a D to a B.
Mia used to work in enrollment at the community college before coming to Westside, so she told me about another hack they tested there. They had a problem: 28% of first-year first-gen students dropped out before midterms, and most of them weren’t failing classes. They just got stuck on a small problem – couldn’t get an appointment with an advisor to change their schedule, couldn’t figure out how to get their financial aid to cover their textbook, forgot to register for next semester’s classes – and no one got back to them fast enough, so they just quit. The official solution would have been hiring five more full-time advisors, which would have cost half a million dollars a year they didn’t have. Instead, they took $15,000 from their existing outreach budget, hired 10 second-year first-gen students part-time at $12 an hour, and gave each student 25 first-years to check in with once a week via text. The check-in wasn’t a 30-minute meeting or a long survey. It was just: “Hey, just checking in – any question you can’t get answered on the website this week?” If there was a problem, the peer mentor would walk them through how to fix it, or escalate it to an advisor if they couldn’t. That one small tweak bumped first-year retention up 18% in a single semester.
I’ve spent the last 8 years volunteering in our school district, and I used to think the only way to get better support for kids was to pass a big bond measure or get a huge donation from a local billionaire. That’s never happened in our district, so I just assumed we’d always have long waitlists and kids falling through the cracks. These growth hacks changed my mind, not in some flashy way. It just made me realize that most of the things that derail kids are small, not big. They’re not a lack of fancy science labs. They’re a 15-year-old who can’t get the math help he needs, or an 18-year-old first-gen kid who doesn’t know who to ask for help with an unexpected textbook charge.
What does this mean for parents, if your kid’s school or college doesn’t do this? It’s actually really easy to nudge them toward small changes. First, if your kid is on a waitlist for support like tutoring, ask the PTA or parent-teacher organization to pitch the peer matching idea to administration. Most local colleges have students who need experience or volunteer hours, and most high schools have upperclassmen who do well in subjects and want extra pocket money or volunteer hours for college apps. It takes a couple of hours a week from one staff member to organize, which is way less than hiring new full-time staff. Second, if your kid is starting college and worried about getting support, tell them to check out student-run peer mentorship programs, not just the formal ones run by administration. A lot of first-gen student groups or honor societies run informal mentorship that never gets advertised on the main admissions website. Third, when you’re touring schools or colleges, don’t just ask about average test scores or the student recreation center. Ask how long the average wait is for tutoring or advising, and what they do when demand is higher than their official budget. That question will tell you more about how they support kids than any glossy brochure.
Not every hack works, of course. The community college first tried sending automatic payment reminders via text, but they found that a lot of low-income students get so many spam texts that they just ignored them. They switched to having peer mentors send the reminders via Instagram DM, and open rates went up 60%. It’s just about testing small things, not waiting for the perfect big solution.
We still have 17 kids on the waitlist for college essay help at Westside right now, and the peer tutors can’t take on any more slots this semester. We’re still talking about what small tweak we can test next – maybe asking local retired teachers to do one essay review a month, that’s the leading idea. It’s not a perfect fix, and we still have gaps. But it’s working better than any big, expensive district-wide program I’ve seen rolled out in my years of volunteering. Most of the time, the thing that makes the biggest difference for kids isn’t a multi-million dollar initiative. It’s just noticing the small gap no one’s filling, and finding a simple, cheap way to fill it.
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