Student Opportunity Center

More than twenty years of research has shown that our education system needs to embed employer-required skills and competencies in the curriculum. These skills are vital for graduation rates, career placement, pay, and other vital long-term benefits. 

Unfortunately, universities have yet to successfully scale experiential learning due to deep and inherent friction between faculty and employers. SOC remedies this tension by "translating/revamping curriculum" for colleges and employers. 

If every university used SOC's platform, all students -- including those, like students of color and nontraditional students, who participate in experiential learning at a lower rate -- would have access to high-quality experiential learning that connected coursework to real-world projects. 

The National Survey of Student Engagement recommends that students participate in at least two high-impact practices (HIPs), which include internships, apprenticeships, and other work-related projects, during college. Their research, however, has shown that more than 40% of college students fail to meet this benchmark. 

As a result, millions of students every year fail to engage in relevant experiential learning opportunities. And students of color, as well as nontraditional and first-generation students, participate in HIPs at lower rates than their peers. 

SOC helps universities scale their provision of HIPs by identifying and vetting projects in a single platform, serving as a liaison between faculty and employers, and aligning all stakeholder expectations. 

SOC provides a platform with accompanying services to connect employer hiring to higher education curriculum. The platform gathers and organizes available experiential learning opportunities for efficient student searches, provides a central clearinghouse for student participation data, and allows faculty to identify projects that align with their course curriculum. 

For colleges and universities, this means SOC contracts with the institution to rebuild their experiential learning curriculum to provide these opportunities to ever student.  

For employers, SOC offers a software platform to post experiential learning projects. Deloitte, for example, creates a 12-week project for Accounting Students to do the quarterly financial forecast of a client. Students are then able to opt into the project based on their career interests. And faculty monitor students' progress on deliverables through the platform itself. 

SOC aims to serve the millions of undergraduates every year who do not participate in meaningful experiential learning opportunities. 

SOC collects student feedback on a regular basis to ensure that its projects require a reasonable degree of effort, are relevant to students' coursework, and allow for helpful feedback between the students and the employer. 

SOC's platform and services are designed to perpetually reevaluate the link between employers' needs and universities' degree programs. By reevaluating these links every semester, SOC helps employers, educators, and job seekers align their programming to ensure that students are building skills that will be valuable and relevant when they leave campus. 

And by providing students a "test drive" of various professions, SOC's work also allows students to make more informed decisions about their career paths by testing various options in a low-risk environment. 

6 (full-time)

SOC recognizes that its ability to expand access to experiential learning for all students requires that its own organization is deeply committed to promoting an inclusive environment where each employee is valued, supported, and empowered to exercise their own unique voice. 

The EL market has developed around individual types of EL at different college departments (i.e. Internship tools selling to Career Center, Volunteering tools selling to Service Learning offices, Research to library, etc.). There is now a need for a central enterprise system to manage all these siloed experiential learning opportunities seamlessly, integrate them into the curriculum (i.e. this internship is part of the Bio101 class), and allow direct collaboration between university faculty/staff and employers to design real-world experiences based on employer needs.

The usual substitutes are very manual and ad-hoc processes (i.e. a professor hears about a summer research program or project, forwards an email to a student she likes, and has them complete a written reflection of the experience).

Now, developing an 'experiential infrastructure' so EVERY student participates in EL has become the subject of over 1000 strategic plans/graduation requirements.

Our technology includes a broad library of integrations, an enterprise software platform, and a research-backed implementation process. 

We currently serve more than 200,000 students across 200 different colleges and universities. You can view more case studies at this link. 

Textbooks and lectures will soon be relegated to the dustbin of history. Students need projects that require persistence, collaboration, and the navigation of all the challenges and ambiguities inherent to modern work.

We aim to become *the* experiential learning company through industry thought leadership, key team members, and organizational partner and, ultimately, ensure that every student has access to high-quality experiential learning opportunities. 

There are a handful of competitors in the space, but they lack our depth of expertise. Some universities feel equipped to scale EL programs on their own, but most do not have the necessary resources. 

We are defending against these barriers by establishing ourselves as *the* experiential learning company through industry thought leadership, key team members, and organizational partners who will help us continue to capture the few hundred key customers which the rest of the market follows.

Nationally, broad participation data in ELs. Locally, long-term outcomes for participants in SOC-sponsored programs.

Work with a network of national experts on experiential learning and High-Impact Practices. These leaders help campuses develop their own comprehensive and sustainable strategies to efficiently scale their experiential education initiatives by consulting on quality, equity, diversity and inclusion, assessment, pedagogy, curricular development, research, and more.

You can view our full team of experts at the bottom of this link. 

We partner with more than 100 companies to identify quality EL opportunities. We also partner with several companies that help collate valuable opportunities and map skills valued by today's employers. 

SOC provides a platform with accompanying services to connect employer hiring to higher education curriculum.

For colleges and universities, this means Enterprise Software and Consulting Contracts to re-build their entire curriculum to provide "Experiential Learning (EL)" to every student.

For employers, this means a software platform to post "Experiential Learning (EL) Projects"-- for example: Deloitte creates a 12-week project for Accounting Students to do the quarterly financial forecast of a client.

For students, this means access to high-quality EL opportunities. 

We grow school by school (both traditional higher education, as well asalternatives like bootcamps & online (i.e. WGU & SNHU are current customers), getting each school to 100% student participation in experiential learning.

With each school comes new employer geographies and industry focuses.

Reimagining Pathways is perfectly aligned with our mission of invigorating a tired model of education by more closely aligning traditional learning experiences with real-world skills needed by today's companies. 

The Reimagining Pathways could help SOC build a broader network of experiential learning opportunities so that our work on every partner campus has a sustainable source of growth. 

Our ceiling is the number of quality opportunities we can provide for students. The demand is there. We just need more participants from the employer world to meet our sky-high ambitions. 

In brief, we are looking to partner with any and all companies willing to lend their time and expertise to the noble challenge of preparing today's students for the modern workforce.