By Exec Edge Editorial Staff
Most contracting models in education services are structured to pay the service provider first and sort out outcomes later. A marketing agency is paid per campaign. A technology platform is paid per seat. An instructional design licensor is paid per program. Student completion, the actual measure of whether the education delivered on its promise, sits outside those payment structures entirely, as a variable neither the university nor the provider has strong financial reason to optimize for in the short term. Over two decades of online education expansion, that misalignment has become one of the quiet structural drivers of the outcomes problem in the sector.
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Risepoint, an education technology company partnered with more than 100 regional public and private universities, has built its business around a different model. The primary contracting mechanism at Risepoint, known as fee for persistence, ties the company’s revenue directly to whether a university partner’s students stay enrolled and progress through their programs. The model is not novel in concept, but it is often misunderstood.
The Capital Flip
The standard way a program gets built at a regional public university runs something like this: the university identifies a program opportunity, commits institutional budget to build it, hires faculty and staff, absorbs the multi-year ramp-up costs, and hopes enrollment arrives fast enough to recoup the investment before the budget cycle forces a cut.
For most regional publics, the math does not work. The upfront cost of bringing a single program to market, at the quality and scale required to compete with national providers, is substantial. That figure covers digital course architecture, technology integration, prospective student outreach, enrollment support, retention systems, and the underlying infrastructure to run all of it.
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Under fee for persistence, Risepoint provides the upfront capital to launch the online programs. The university pays nothing to Risepoint in advance. The company provides the capital needed to support the program build, the market entry costs, and the outreach spend required to reach prospective students. From the university’s perspective, this converts a capital-intensive expansion into an operationally funded one: the program launches, students enroll, and revenue begins flowing without the substantial upfront capital that large-scale program launches typically require.
Paid as Students Progress
The compensation structure is built around a simple principle: Risepoint is paid course by course, only as students stay enrolled and move forward. Students pay tuition directly to the university. The university pays Risepoint a share of that tuition only after a student is actively enrolled and progressing in a given course. There is no upfront payment, no lump-sum settlement, and no moment at which Risepoint has been made whole while the student’s outcome is still uncertain.
That structure means Risepoint’s financial interest runs the full length of a student’s program, not just through the initial enrollment process. From first enrollment through graduation, Risepoint retention specialists work directly with students: they flag scheduling conflicts, support re-enrollment, and help adult learners navigate the friction that stops working adults from finishing degrees. That work is what the business model requires, because Risepoint only earns as students progress.
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Unqualified or unprepared enrollees generate cost without generating revenue. Risepoint bears the outreach and onboarding expense, and the student then does not advance. Student success and company success are financially the same thing. That constraint shapes how Risepoint approaches outreach quality and student fit from the start.
Where the Risk Sits
The larger value of the model for universities lies in mitigating the financial risk of student failure. Under the traditional vendor model, if a student fails to persist, the provider is already paid. The university is the party holding the bag on underperforming programs. Under fee for persistence, the math reverses. When a student enrolls, Risepoint has already invested in that student, from prospective student outreach to enrollment support and onboarding costs. If the student does not progress through the course, Risepoint does not recover those costs. On the other hand, the university, which was paid its share of the initial course tuition, is not in the red on that student.
Enrolling students who are not positioned to succeed is a loss for Risepoint. Prospective student outreach and onboarding costs have already been spent with no revenue to follow. That structural reality shapes how the company approaches the front end of the student relationship.
Non-Academic Retention Infrastructure
The operational implication is that Risepoint-supported programs invest heavily in retention infrastructure, and that the retention infrastructure is specifically non-academic. The academic core of each program remains entirely with the university: faculty teach the courses, the university admits students and awards degrees. What Risepoint adds sits alongside the academic experience: enrollment support, schedule planning, proactive outreach when a student falls behind, and sequencing guidance for working adults whose lives do not fit the traditional semester calendar.
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Much of the retention work is logistical. A teacher working on their master’s during summer break needs someone to flag the availability of courses in July if they are stepping out in June. A parent with children in school needs scheduling advice on which semester to assign heavier course loads. A working professional pursuing an MBA needs prerequisite sequencing help so she does not end up stuck waiting for a course offered only in alternating terms. None of that is academic instruction, but it is the kind of operational support that often determines whether an adult learner actually finishes the degree.
The Persistence Outcome
A 2025 Ipsos study of Risepoint-supported programs produced a clear measure of whether the aligned-incentive model actually delivers what its design intends.
Two findings from the Ipsos data speak most directly to persistence and its economic payoff. Graduates reported an average salary lift of 19% in the year following graduation. The average tuition payback period (defined as the time it takes the graduate’s salary gain to cover the full cost of the degree) came in at 18 months.
A program that enrolls unqualified students does not produce 18-month payback outcomes, because the students who would have produced those outcomes drop out somewhere in the middle. An 18-month aggregate payback across several thousand graduates is only possible if the retention system is keeping the students whose program fits them enrolled through completion. The payback finding is less about tuition pricing and more about who is graduating.
A Graduate in Durant, Oklahoma
The outcomes picture at the aggregate level is one thing. The path through an individual student’s life is another. A graduate of the online MBA at Southeastern Oklahoma State University illustrates the shape of what the contracting model is engineered to produce for the adult learner who completes it. She came from a rural southeastern Oklahoma community where affordability was the binding constraint on her return to school, and she worked three jobs through the duration of the program to keep the tuition payments current. She now holds a management role at one of Oklahoma’s largest credit unions, focused on financial services for low-and-moderate-income customers. Her career is anchored in the same regional economy where she trained.
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Her trajectory is representative of the outcome the model is built to produce: an adult learner whose program was priced within reach, whose retention infrastructure kept her enrolled through genuine life friction, and whose credential produced measurable career and earnings change on a timeline short enough that the investment paid back quickly.
What the Model Produces
The fee for persistence contracting model is designed to align the interests of Risepoint and its university partners. The contract distributes risk in a way that only rewards the service provider if the student finishes. That shapes operational behavior downstream: which students learn about programs, how retention is resourced, and how the university’s academic leadership gets to keep its focus on the academic core instead of the operational machinery around it.
The fee-for-persistence model answers the contracting question that has run beneath online education expansion for two decades: who bears the cost of a student who does not finish. Under the traditional arrangement, the service provider does not. Under this one, Risepoint does. That distribution of risk is the mechanism that drives operational decisions about which students learn about programs, how retention is staffed, and how the university’s academic leadership keeps its focus on instruction rather than the operational machinery around it. For the regional public institutions that have tried and struggled to build sustainable online programs on their own, the evidence from Risepoint-supported partnerships is that the incentive alignment produces results: graduates who finish, earn credentials that pay back quickly, and stay in the regional economies where their programs were designed to serve.
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