Bridgeport was not new to AI. Chatbots were running and voice agents were live. But retention, student success, and every AI project alike were being solved one at a time, and the team didn't have the IT budget to continue this.
"I went in thinking they were going to sell me another chatbot. I walked out understanding how I could deploy across the enterprise," says Sandeep Mannava, Chief Information Officer at the University of Bridgeport and Goodwin University.
Two decades of the same pricing model, running on two disconnected systems
For the past two decades, the approach hadn't changed: set a freshman revenue goal, work backward into bands by GPA and test score, and tweak the merit award. But international enrollment is thinning, high-revenue students are fewer, and more of the class is now non-traditional. The class can hit its headcount and still land two or three million dollars short.
Underneath that model sat a deeper split. Recruitment lived in Slate; everything after enrollment, including finance and HR, lived in Colleague. The same student existed twice, with no connection between the two records.
One data layer, and pricing scenarios leadership runs itself
Partnering with CollegeVine, Bridgeport resolved both records to one person. It took 3 days to move Colleague and Slate onto the ontology, pulling in 193 Slate tables and 54 Colleague Ethos endpoints. From there, Bridgeport and CollegeVine modeled matriculation and retention at the program level across four years, weighing each student's cost against their revenue instead of optimizing only for year one. That shift produced millions in additional lifetime revenue from the same aid budget.
The result is an app leadership runs directly: tuition, class-size cap, and cost-per-student dials on one side, expected enrollees and per-student awards on the other. A CFO asking what a 25% tuition discount for a hospital partnership would cost used to mean weeks of outside data-gathering. Now it's a setting on a screen.
The model runs daily in production, too: roughly 20 admits a day are scored on lifetime value, with the institutional award posting straight back to Slate for Colleague's existing auto-packaging to finish, and a counselor can still move the number in conversation.
"I have worked with a lot of technology companies over 25 years. Everybody says six months, a year. These folks talk in weeks," Mannava says.
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