Cary, NC, 16th January 2025 The National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE), North America’s leading advocate for entrepreneurship education and programming for community and technical colleges, has announced a new partnership and pilot program with Epixego, a National Science Foundation-winner. Epixego is a mentoring solution software that helps expand student access to peer-to-peer mentoring in the classroom.
“We are happy to announce this exciting new alliance,” said NACCE President and CEO Rebecca Corbin. “Epixego focuses on mentorship and experiential learning applications that faculty can use to encourage student engagement and ultimately improve completion rates, transfer pathways, and help create successful entrepreneurs.”
Combining Technology with Human Connection
By combining Epixego’s AI-powered mentoring and experiential learning technology with human connection, the pilot aims to help faculty boost engagement and entrepreneurial skills. For NACCE member colleges it will integrate:
– Near-peer mentoring
– Competency-based learning
– Asset-based self-reflection
– Social capital development
This approach cultivates crucial social capital skills through mentorship in the classroom, giving students agency and self-efficacy for career-connected learning.
The technology creates comprehensive learning journey profiles to generate personalized recommendations for mentors and experiential learning to propel career guidance and academic navigation. It also addresses the critical shortage of counseling resources in public colleges, where student-to-counselor ratios can reach 1:1,800. Epixego aims to expand the toolkits of each faculty member’s learning strategies to enhance classroom learning.
Transforming Student Engagement
“NACCE’s partnership with Epixego represents a powerful synergy in our mission to uplift communities through entrepreneurship and innovation,” said Anita Balaraman, founder of Epixego and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “By leveraging Epixego’s NSF-funded mentoring solution, we can dramatically expand access to critical guidance for all students, particularly those in community colleges.
“The collaboration has the potential to cultivate successful entrepreneurs and professionals. NACCE’s network of nearly 400 community and technical colleges, serving over 3.3 million students, provides the ideal platform to scale this innovative, cost-effective mentoring approach. Together, we’re not just enhancing education, we’re empowering the next generation of innovators and leaders across America.”