As a teacher at a private high school in an affluent San Francisco Bay-area community and later as a dean at a high-needs public charter school in California, Vielka Hoy noticed wide differences between the two institutions in college-attainment rates and in where students decided to matriculate.
The disparities had less to do with academic ability than with perceptions about affordability, awareness of school options and how opportunities for access were structured, said Hoy.
She developed a passion for educational equity, which led her to establish a college preparation and success consultancy for underserved students in 2013. Now, she’s poised to take it a step further with the Bridge To College mobile app.
“I saw some things that could be translated to other schools and that could change a lot, so I started the consulting business,” said Hoy. “It worked really well. And I thought, ‘How can we scale that using technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning, what I was doing in person, so more folk had access to it?’”
The app was the answer for the UC Berkeley doctoral student, who is currently writing her dissertation on data science. It is designed to improve transparency, accessibility, affordability and graduation rates by using comprehensive survey methodology to match students with schools based on academic fit, financial capability and social compatibility.
Bridge To College can fill a void in college-selection advisement and help level the playing field for underrepresented students, Hoy said. Helping them identify a school that is a good academic fit, has significant financial resources available and graduates students at high rates can boost their persistence rates, which tend to be lower while their student loan debt often is higher, she noted.
In creating the tool, Hoy drew on her 20 years of experience as a middle school and high school teacher and a college instructor. Her academic background includes a bachelor’s degree in social studies education from New York University, a master’s degree in Afro-American Studies from UCLA and work as a program associate and specialist in educational technologies at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.
