Funding supports innovations that expand equitable access to social capital for today’s diverse learners
DENVER and LEXINGTON, Mass., Dec. 17, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — InScribe Education, a provider of digital communities and online engagement advisory services for higher education, today announced that it has been awarded a grant from the Clayton Christensen Institute through its Networked Guidance Pilot Fund. The initiative supports solutions that help learners build the social capital, relationships, and guidance that open doors to academic and career opportunity.
For today’s non-traditional and historically underserved students, the path to opportunity requires more than earning a degree. The Clayton Christensen Institute’s report The Missing Metrics: Emerging practices for measuring students’ relationships and networks highlights that students’ access to relationships and networks is often left to chance, even though these connections are closely tied to long-term success. Meaningful relationships with mentors, peers, supporters, and professional contacts are essential, and a degree on its own is often not enough to secure employment. Download report.
The grant will support the development and validation of InScribe’s innovation designed to help institutions cultivate social capital across the student experience. The experience will create digital ecosystems where students build networks organically, assisted by AI that helps surface the right people, conversations, and resources at the right time. It is intentionally designed to expand human connection and ensure that students can form meaningful relationships with peers, faculty, advisors, and mentors.
This work aligns with the Clayton Christensen Institute’s broader research on networked guidance, which calls for intentionally cultivating students’ social capital to support both persistence and post-graduation success.
“While AI unlocks enormous possibilities for student support and guidance, human connection remains as important as ever in helping students access the networks they need to thrive in school and in the labor market. We are delighted to be learning alongside platforms dedicated to building prosocial tech,” said Julia Freeland Fisher, Director of Education Research at the Clayton Christensen Institute.
“InScribe was founded on the belief that students succeed when they can easily get the help they need, whenever they need it,” said Veronica Skudlarczyk, Head of Product and User Experience at InScribe. But help is only the beginning. “Degree completion is just one milestone. Students must also have access to the connections and support systems that lead to opportunity. This partnership with the Clayton Christensen Institute helps us accelerate solutions that make social capital visible, accessible, and achievable for every student.”
Through partnerships with colleges and universities, InScribe is helping institutions drive measurable improvements in student success. Across its network of partners, InScribe has supported outcomes such as increased student engagement, faster response times to student questions, higher utilization of support services, and gains in retention and persistence. Institutions have also reported stronger peer connection, improved sense of belonging, and more efficient cross-campus communication.
Explore additional partnership outcomes and case studies at https://www.inscribeapp.com/case-studies.
About InScribe
InScribe is a digital student support platform that leverages the power of community and artificial intelligence to connect students with the answers, resources, and individuals they need to succeed. InScribe’s digital communities cut across the traditional support silos in higher education, giving students a single place to turn when they need help—no matter the topic or time of day. Students benefit from on-demand, peer-to-peer, and student-to-expert collaboration which helps them feel more connected, increasing student engagement, satisfaction, and retention. Learn more about InScribe at https://www.inscribeapp.com/.
About the Clayton Christensen Institute
The Clayton Christensen Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to improving the world through Disruptive Innovation. Founded on the theories of Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, the Institute offers a unique framework for understanding many of society’s most pressing problems. Learn more about Clayton Christensen Institute.
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SOURCE InScribe
