StudentSpace was born in the high deserts of Northern New Mexico in 1998 when a group of educators who had an extreme student-centric philosophy got frustrated with the existing systems in use. The first major gap addressed was student advising, as known to all - correct or accurate student advising is the most important experience for a student which directly impacts their successful time in college. This, retention which is apart described by Dr. Tinto that student retention starts in the classroom.

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However, to be placed in the right classroom, proper advising is a must. While the college was using POISE software, the student advising module developed by StudentSpace was implemented in the advising department. This vision soon grew to incorporate student retention, education planning, and basic institutional research analytics. Within two years, more than 8 campuses were using StudentSpace’s tracking system in New Mexico. Most of these campuses were funded by Title V Grants. The Title V grants were focusing on increasing retention and graduation rates for Hispanic students. StudentSpace designed around the students became the number one choice for these grantees to meet their goals and compliance. One important out of many excellent student tracking features was cohort tracking in which learning communities could be created/tracked and retained by implementing early intervention.​

 

Beyond a vision of educators in search of an extremely user-friendly system, this product was the first to incorporate an early intervention module that completed or complemented the student-tracking advising services and education planning that were already in the system. The combination of excellent software creators and a consortium of New Mexico and Texas colleges gave further impetus to this mission. In presentations and conferences, StudentSpace was treated like the launch of Apple by Steve Jobs. Many Title V/III Directors would get up in the audience and explain can I write the cheque right now for the software?

 

This dedication and enthusiasm were due to an extremely well-designed software with the simplify of point and click covered the complex algorithms behind whose intelligence and output were the dream of any educator for his or her students. The education plan, whenever its new features were launched at conferences, the users would await it like the launch of a new iPad or iPhone. The software and its mission spread to Texas, Arizona, Arkansas, New Jersey, and all the way to Alaska. It impressed the Department of Education so much that anyone including StudentSpace products in their proposals would usually get funded. The staff at the US Department of Education were so impressed by this, that they made an exception to their policies and attended a StudentSpace conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

 

They were convinced that the company’s motive was the students and not just to make money which is very easy in this business. It has to be remembered in those early days of the new millennium, easy to use point and click interfaces were still a dream for many campuses. Also, concepts like student tracking and early intervention were being discussed and introduced in various conferences and were now entering the mainstream. But nobody in the US or perhaps globally had transformed these concepts into working software. In this, StudentSpace has been an undisputed pioneer and over its two-decade run has tracked intervened, and reported on over a quarter million students from campuses where the student population is usually less than 5000.

 

The Early Alert module created an unprecedented impact in catching and supporting students early in the semester in the classroom. By then, it was proven that the traditional midterm grade was too late to correct the course of the failing student. StudentSpace quickly spread to other parts of the world, beyond the US, and focused on the large student population of India. In India, StudentSpace helped hundreds of schools track and retain at-risk students. Over the two decades, many offers were made by large companies to buy and repackage the software but since these companies wanted to raise the price exorbitantly, the Board refused such lucrative offers so that the price could fit the budget of small institutions worldwide. It is important to mention that this organization from the very start has been what is now called a Social Enterprise.

 

As Mr. Eric Lawson of Rio University says often - StudentSpace is a company with a big heart. Time and again, StudentSpace has done 100s of hours of programming and tech support free or heavily discounted for institutions that were short of funds but desperately needed the tech support. When the hurricane struck Puerto Rico, the institutions could not pay the annual maintenance support fee but as per StudentSpace policy - the whole year of support was given so that the students who were being tracked and supported were not left behind merely because the natural disaster had caused their college not to pay the AMC.(competency base module)

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The team behind StudentSpace in its usual innovative way, was the first company to introduce competency-based learning audits. The competency audit implemented at the Santa Fe community college in the early childhood program under Dr. Frances Levine was a success and it introduced the concept of skill/competency level feedback to the learners which made far more sense than a simple A or B grade at the end of the semester.

 

In northern New Mexico, the institution went one step further and shared the competency audits with local employers and even suggested that if any competency area, the student fails to perform at his job, then the college will retrain the student in that skill free of cost. This kind of philosophy did change the lives of hundreds of students who otherwise would have been condemned to a life of very low-skilled jobs and constant threats of unemployment. The R&D team of StudentSpace introduced the concept of Education Intelligence in the year 2000 and the IR (Institutional Research) Departments greatly benefited from reports and data analytics which would take weeks or months in traditional systems. In short, this company with the Grande Corazen not only changed the landscape in New Mexico and neighboring states but has also affected student lives in faraway lands.

 

Now, we have multiple offices globally - Santa Fe, the US, and India.