VP of Product
Modern Campus: The answer for student retention
Modern Campus lives at the intersection of technology and higher education—building the digital experiences that help colleges and universities engage students through every phase of their journey. With over 1,700 institutions across North America on its platform, Modern Campus powers everything from initial college access and enrollment through on-campus engagement, continuing education, and workforce development.
At its core, Modern Campus exists to help higher ed institutions build stronger relationships with learners in a time when retention and enrollment are under immense pressure. Speaking of the American landscape, Charles Parsons, VP of Product at Modern Campus says, “We’re questioning the value of higher education as a whole. We’re seeing a declining enrollment, overall. It’s very important for schools to bring back students who have opted out.”
The challenge of keeping students engaged and enrolled is where Modern Campus shines. And central to that mission is Modern Campus Message, a platform that helps institutions scale meaningful one-to-one communication—built on dependable messaging infrastructure from Bandwidth.
When connection determines completion
Across the United States, declining enrollments and rising student debt are forcing institutions to rethink how they engage learners. For many students, the choice to “stop out”—leaving school with the intent to return—isn’t about willpower. It’s about life happening.
“Most stopouts are for financial or personal reasons,” Parsons explains. “Our Stop-Out Playbook reengages those students. If a student says they haven’t returned because of cost, they instantly get resources for financial aid, scholarships, bursar payment plans, or grants—right from within a text conversation.”
The approach blends automation and empathy. Institutions send a broad message, but the moment a student replies, the conversation becomes deeply personal.
“Nobody’s responding to email. Calls are going unanswered,” says Parsons. “But getting people to start a relationship with text messaging really isn’t as hard as trying to use the traditional methods. People are already there.”
That text-first approach has led to remarkable results: colleges using Modern Campus Message and the stop-out playbook are seeing a 500–600% ROI in some cases, according to Parsons. And for many public and community colleges, the benefits go beyond tuition dollars: the more students who stay enrolled, the more funding they receive from state and federal sources.
It’s not just about business ROI. Parsons affirms, “I really believe in the power of higher education for making lives better.”
Solving scale, compliance, and complexity
Building a messaging platform that meets the unique needs of higher education required Modern Campus to take on challenges far beyond software design. Compliance, message deliverability, carrier changes, and scaling across diverse institutions all had to be solved without distracting from their mission.
That’s where Bandwidth came in.
“We found a great partner in Bandwidth because we know that no matter what, it’s just going to work for us. We don’t have to think about what the scaling issues are going to be as we become more successful. Bandwidth is always there to solve that problem for us. And as things are changing in the landscape, we learn from our friends over at Bandwidth what we need to know to keep ahead of our competitors.”
“Everything just works,” says Parsons.
When wireless carriers introduced new 10DLC (10-digit long code) registration requirements for application-to-person (A2P) messaging, Modern Campus stayed ahead of the curve. “As those new requirements came out, Bandwidth guided us through every change,” Parsons explains.
“We were able to get our traffic registered months before any of the deadlines, and there was not even a blip in our service. It was a cumbersome and fraught process for a lot of our competitors, but not for us.”
—Charles Parsons, VP of Product, Modern Campus
That proactive partnership allows Modern Campus to stay focused on what it does best: building tools that help higher ed institutions thrive.
Scaling messaging that feels personal
Every college and university is different: different brands, missions, student demographics, even communication styles. Modern Campus had to design an approach that could scale while honoring those differences.
“The Stop-Out playbook is not one-size-fits-all,” Parsons says.” It’s really a blueprint that evolves over time as we learn more about what is working and what isn’t working for each institution. Every institution is unique and special, and it has its own way, its own language, its own idiom for how it’s going to be interacting with its students. And, we want to make sure that we’re including that in the messaging.”
That flexibility now extends beyond re-enrollment efforts. Modern Campus envisions messaging as a connective tissue across its entire product portfolio. It’s the common channel that links user experience from prospective student outreach through on-campus engagement to continuing education and alumni relations.
“We call it the ‘learner-to-earner’ lifecycle,” Parsons explains.
Powering reliability, freeing focus
The future for Modern Campus is one of integration.
“Our goal is to get messaging into every product in our portfolio,” says Parsons. “We believe really strongly that building connections and building relationships over time means that an institution will be able to keep that student, not just from the early days when they were getting their undergraduate degree, but all the way through graduate as they developed out into alumni when they’re, you know, giving back to the institution when they want to upskill in the workforce all the way through.”
Parsons sums it up, “Like I said, that learner-to-earner lifecycle.”
And, partnering with Bandwidth has simplified that path for them.
“We’ve been able to focus on our higher education customers because we don’t have to think about all the telco rules, and all the new things are coming down the pipe. It really is something where Bandwidth just takes care of for us.”
—Charles Parsons, VP of Product, Modern Campus
The next chapter: Messaging, AI, and modern engagement
Looking ahead, Modern Campus sees messaging continuing to anchor how institutions connect with students, enhanced by new technologies like RCS (Rich Communication Services) and generative AI.
“There have been shifts in higher education over the last couple of years where we’re seeing a declining enrollment, overall,” Parsons admits. “But also there’s a new generation of technology like RCS and generative AI that’s going to play a role here. Especially when it comes to answering questions more quickly, more fully giving the options they need. Especially with RCS, the options they need, really at their fingertips so that it’s not necessarily always a conversation, but it can go from an interaction to a conversation and back and forth again.”
With AI, Modern Campus can help institutions give timely, relevant responses, and guide students toward completion like never before. And with RCS, those same messages will become richer, more interactive, and more personal.
Talking about his best advice for messaging platforms, Parsons’s outlook is— “In personal relationships, don’t abandon the 1-to-1 conversations because those are the most important. But do use generative AI and technology advances to get some of the stuff out of the way so you can do it at scale.”
Powered by purpose and partnership
For Parsons, this mission is deeply personal.
“I was a very non-traditional student,” he says. “It took me a while to get my degree. But it’s opened up doors, and I think I could open up doors for others as well.”
And it’s what drives Modern Campus. Their purpose is not technology for its own sake—it’s technology that keeps people learning, connected, and growing.
“I see partnerships, like with companies like Bandwidth, helping us achieve our mission because we don’t always have the answers to everything,” Parsons concludes. “We can’t be the experts in all things at all times. We want to focus entirely on higher education. We have our ideas. Bandwidth provides us with their ideas, and marrying the two together creates very powerful products for our customers.”
