How Stellic Evolved Alongside the Institutions We Serve: A Look Back at 2025

Throughout 2025, higher education found itself in a period of rapid transformation. The overall good news is that college enrollment grew for the third straight year. But those learners have become more mobile. The latest data show that 1.2 million students transferred institutions — a 4.4% increase from the previous year — and that the national population of college stopouts has climbed above 43 million.

At the same time, colleges and universities must manage increasingly unreliable funding sources while students, taxpayers and policymakers are expecting institutions to deliver more to meet changing expectations: more personalized experiences, more efficient and transparent pathways to completing degree programs, a greater return on investment, and the skills and knowledge to help graduates navigate a rapidly shifting job market where AI is disrupting the entry-level job market.

In this context, the work of supporting students has never been more consequential. Advisors, registrars, and institutional leaders are navigating shifting policies, fragmented systems, and growing caseloads, all while striving to keep students on track and confident in their progress.

This year, institutions used Stellic in new and expanded ways to meet these challenges, supporting more decisions, more students, and more coordinated planning across campus. In 2025, there were nearly twice as many staff and student decisions on Stellic as they had across the platform’s first seven years combined. Registrations increased sevenfold and searches nearly tripled. These are signals of growing demand for clearer pathways, stronger self-service, and more coordinated planning. In step with this growth, we refreshed our brand, deepened partnerships across campuses, and launched a new solution designed to better support transfer students.

In 2025, Stellic introduced a new brand identity that makes clear our vision to empower students, inspire teammates, and energize higher education leaders. Our new logo is inspired by the North Star, a symbol of guidance and certainty that reflects our commitment to helping students navigate complex academic decisions with confidence. Our refined color palette, visual language, and intentional voice are intended to make everyone feel that the Stellic platform was built for them. The results were more than just a rebrand. It was our way of saying what we believe the future of higher education should be and the role we hope to play in getting it there.

We also welcomed new engineers, designers, implementation specialists, and partner success managers from higher ed, leading edtech orgs, and some of today’s most innovative startups. Together, we're working to better support campuses of all sizes and ensure the platform remains intuitive, reliable, and grounded in real student and staff experiences.

In September 2025, Stellic’s Partner Summit brought together 180 advisors, registrars, students, and technologists in D.C. to explore how we can connect and work in tandem. Across sessions, a common theme emerged: structure and empathy go hand in hand. Every rule, workflow, and advising decision has a real impact on a student’s path. The Summit created space for institutions to reflect on that balance together and learn from one another.

In 2025, we officially launched Explore, a new product designed to help students navigate one of higher education’s most complex and consequential processes: transfer credit evaluation. The launch came as transfer enrollment climbed nationwide and institutions sought better ways to re-engage the millions of learners who have earned some college credit but no credential.

By automating and standardizing evaluations, Explore gives students real-time insight into how their prior coursework applies toward programs at prospective institutions while freeing staff to focus on guiding students, not managing spreadsheets or reconciling competing data sources.

Explore now joins our degree management tool Progress and our proactive advising tool Care as part of Stellic’s growing suite of options designed to remove barriers, reduce complexity, and create more transparent pathways to completion.

What made 2025 exceptional was seeing how much our partners were able to accomplish, and being able to support that progress. As we look to the year ahead, we’re focused on building thoughtfully on that momentum. While the platform continues to help streamline processes and bring clarity, we know that person-to-person connection and collaboration remain at the heart of effective student support we all do. With more than 1.8 million students using Stellic today, our work stays grounded in people first, and that commitment will continue to guide us into 2026 and beyond.