Admithub founders Andrew Magliozzi and Kirk Daulerio interview

Admithub co-founder
Andrew Magliozzi
Admithub

• Admithub is a chatbot built for college
  campuses.
• Using Admithub students could, for example, ask a
  last-minute question about FASFA at 1 a.m or a question about
  applying for housing. Or university officials could send a
  message with a reminder to submit enrollment forms.
• Admithub is used by 30 colleges and universities,
  including Arizona State University and Georgia State
  University.

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As a college prep tutor, Andrew Magliozzi had a difficult
time getting students to respond to him. Emails and phone calls
were unreliable at best.

Eventually, he found, texting was the only thing that worked.

“I said one day ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if kids could text their way
to college,'” Magliozzi told Business Insider. “Before I
could say how dumb that was, Kirk was encouraging me to build
it.”

Based on the idea of students texting their way to
college, Magliozzi and his friend, Kirk Daulerio, eventually
founded Admithub, an AI powered chatbot made for college
campuses. Using an avatar of the school’s mascot, Admithub’s
chatbot can send reminders to student’s phones and answer
questions about campus life, from financial aid to parking on
campus.

A student could, for example, ask a last-minute question about
FASFA at 1 a.m or a question about applying for housing. Or
university officials could send a message with a reminder to
submit enrollment forms.

“The challenge is providing students with individualized support,
but there’s limited human resources available at these colleges.
So how do you capture their attention and do that at scale? The
solution is mobile messaging. They’re on their phones
24/7,” Magliozzi said.

Admithub is used by 30 universities, including Arizona State
University, Georgia State University, and The Cooper Union.

Summer melt

Magliozzi and Daulerio first envisioned Admithub as a way to
decrease summer melt, or the number of students who get accepted
into colleges, but ultimately do not make it on campus.
According to researchers at Harvard University, summer melt
can affect between 10% and 40% of students who intend to
enroll. 

Previous research had shown that texting campaigns were
successful in alleviating the problem, which is prevalent among
low-income, first generation, and minority students. But mass
texting campaigns aren’t practical for schools with limited
resources. Magliozzi and Daulerio thought a chatbot
that could automatically send “nudges” or suggestions to students
would allow the same concept to scale. 

“Chatbots can really scale and supercharge the daily lives of
staffs,” Magliozzi said. “You would need so much man-power
or a mass call center to make an idea like that happen.

The team built its own AI and natural language processing system
to power the chatbot. While Magliozzi and Daulerio
could have used something off-the-shelf, those programs weren’t
made with particular university-specific terms in mind, such as
“quad.” The names of a specific events, too, caused some trouble.
Georgia State’s orientation is named “Incept” and with Admithub’s
own AI, the team could build that in. 

In 2016, Georgia State became the first school to use Admithub as
a way to combat summer melt. After one summer, the school
increased enrollment by 3.3%, which saved the university $3
million dollars in tuition revenue. From there, Magliozzi
and Daulerio found that the same concept could be applied to
all aspects of university life.

“There’s so much potential to distill all of the communications
from every department into one vehicle,” Magliozzi said.

Still, while Magliozzi and Daulerio said that Admithub helps
to solve a major problem for universities, some don’t have a
budget to invest in a chatbot. And making the case to move
from physical mail, email, and phone calls to AI, is a
challenge.

“Some are willing to make that leap, there’s others that would
rather take an incremental approach and try to make something on
their own,” Magliozzi said.