Cutting-edge-ucators

Melvin Hines Jr. is an entrepreneur on a mission. As a teen in Albany, Georgia, Hines was disturbed by the high dropout rate among his high school classmates. That unease persisted when he went to college and saw scores of his fellow students hampered by economic and social inequities. It took a while, but Hines did something to address his concerns. Once he earned three degrees of his own, Hines and a partner founded a Texas-based educational software firm called Upswing. Today, Upswing’s online products are helping more than 80 colleges and universities boost students’ success by connecting them to peer tutoring, intensive advising, and other services.

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Brian Hill’s social conscience was formed early, while he grew up in a large California family devoted to serving others. Hill’s father, a community college psychology instructor, also taught classes to inmates in Folsom State Prison, and he used that experience to foster empathy among young Brian and his five siblings. Decades later, Brian Hill has combined that empathetic urge with an entrepreneurial spirit to build Edovo, a thriving educational software company designed to give incarcerated men and women a leg up on a better future. In just a few years, Chicago-based Edovo has grown into an 85-employee firm that makes more than 25,000 tablet computers available in correctional facilities.

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Entrepreneur Helen Adeosun is a scholar and a striver, but she’s spent plenty of time in the trenches. Along with degrees from Notre Dame and Harvard, Adeosun boasts a wealth of work experience—as a babysitter, a nanny, a teacher, a social worker, and a home-health aide. All of that learning served her well as the co-founder and CEO of CareAcademy, a Massachusetts-based firm that produces instructional modules that home caregivers use on mobile phones or tablet computers. Adeosun, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, launched CareAcademy in 2013. It now has more than 200 home-health companies as clients.

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