A new app, developed by an Indianapolis-based startup, could help parents and professors track whether students are attending classes.
Here's how Class120 works.
Students download the app, which is free to download but requires a $17.99 monthly subscription, onto their phone and input their class schedule. The phone then tracks where they are on campus using their phone's GPS.
If they aren't in class at the time they're supposed to be, it sends a notification to their parents.
Indiana University parent Greg Havill says it's been good for his family so far. Havill's son told his dad about the app, and they decided it would help him attend all his classes.
"As a parent, if on average we're shelling out close to $20,000 a year for a kid to go to school, I think it's the least we can do is ask our kids to go to class," Havill says.
The program's designers at CorePrinciple want to do more than just track whether students are in class though. They have a whole computer program universities can use to try to boost on time graduation rates by identifying students at risk of dropping out.
"What all of these dropouts say is it happened, I stopped going to class and no one called, no one noticed, no one knew it," CorePrinciple CEO Jeff Whorley says.
The idea is that using the Class120 program, professors and counselors could tell if students are missing class and reach out to them before it's too late.
Students on average attend about 75 percent of their classes and about half of them graduate within four years. Whorley estimates that if universities, with the help of Class120, can get students going to 90 percent of their classes, about 80 percent would graduate on time.
He also says there needs to be conversation about whether letting students decide if they go to class without immediate consequences is the best way to help them mature and prepare them for demanding jobs.
"We've heard that college is a time for students to become adults and they need to have complete freedom to make these decisions on their own. That's a powerful cultural message," Whorley says. "But when you step back from it and talk to students who have graduated from college or who dropped out and are now in the economy, they have a very different view."
Some educators say the threat of failing school should be consequence enough. Others add that Class120 is a good tool but not a silver bullet.
"On the one hand it might get students to class, so that's good, but it's not going to stop them from sitting in the back of the room and checking Facebook," says Alexander McCormick, the director of the National Survey of Student Engagement."
McCormick says that's why universities should also focus on how to get students engaged.
"There's lots of evidence that shows students develop the most when they are challenged and supported," McCormick says. "So they are put in a situation in which they have to really stretch themselves and then they are able to accomplish a goal that might have seemed unreachable."
CorePrinciple leaders are in talks with multiple colleges, including some in Indiana, about implementing Class120 into their graduation strategies.
