Founded in 1989, Posse Foundation was a nonprofit organization with a mission of developing future leaders who reflected the U.S.'s rich diversity. The organization ran a selective, localized admissions process in 10 U.S. cities to identify outstanding students with leadership potential, known as Posse Scholars. Then, it placed them in "posses" - groups of 10 Scholars from the same city - at selective U.S. higher education institutions, which agreed to provide full tuition to all selected Scholars. Although Posse did not screen applicants for race or financial need, it focused selection efforts in areas with racial and socioeconomic diversity. Posse received national recognition and expanded considerably in the decades after its founding, but by 2020 its growth had started to plateau. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Posse signed up several new partners, driven in part by a new, virtual selection option that could find Scholars from locations beyond the cities where Posse maintained brick-and-mortar offices. The virtual option might help Posse scale, but it was not yet clear whether bringing together Scholars from different places versus from the same city would have any implications for the program's effectiveness. Looking ahead, Posse Founder and CEO Deborah Bial considered how to continue Posse's momentum and sign up more institutional partners. Posse focused exclusively on roughly 150 of the most selective colleges and universities, and some prospective partners were unwilling or unable to work with Posse unless it only selected students with financial need. Expanding the list of potential partners or adding a financial need screen might yield more partnerships, but Bial and the rest of the Posse team believed that working with selective institutions and being solely merit-based were key parts of Posse's identity and its ability to achieve its mission. How could Posse best position itself for continued scaling?

Georgia State University had developed a reputation for driving student success by nearly doubling its graduation rate for students of all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. It did so while growing its student body and the proportion of Black/African American, low-income, and first-generation students-groups with historically lower postsecondary graduation rates compared to national averages. Georgia State's Student Success team, led by Tim Renick and Allison Calhoun-Brown, used a data-based approach to deploy micro-grant programs to retain students, implemented predictive analytics to improve student advising, and optimized course sequencing to help students graduate before they exhausted their financial aid. In 2016, they faced a growing "summer melt" problem where nearly 20% of incoming students who committed to attend never actually enrolled at Georgia State-and many never enrolled at any college. At the same time, they wondered how to balance continuing to incrementally improve student success at Georgia State and scaling their efforts to help the many other universities facing similar problems who sought to learn from their experience.

This is a supplement to the Student Success at Georgia State University (A) case. The (B) case includes the results of a randomized control trial that Georgia State conducted to test education technology start-up AdmitHub's chatbot solution as a strategy for improving "summer melt" (i.e., applicants confirming that they planned to enroll but then not enrolling).