BERKELEY, CALIF. — In the corner of UC Berkeley’s Haas campus courtyard sits a local coffee shop called Cafe Think. It’s usually buzzing with students and professors grabbing a quick bite or using the space to study. During Manny Smith’s first week at Haas as an MBA student in 2019, he ran into Haas undergraduate Alyson Isaacs. 

Smith, an Air Force Veteran, came to Haas after seven years of military service. As a next step in his career, Smith wanted to leverage his military experience to work on a socially responsible project that promotes human equity through entrepreneurship. 

Smith was struck by Isaacs’s story: she navigated a tough community college ecosystem for three years before transferring into Cal’s undergraduate business program, which only has a five percent admit rate for transfer students. Her story prompted the question of why transfer rates from community colleges are so low relative to four year and even graduate programs. Upon doing initial research, Smith found that this problem was deeply systemic. 

Their short meeting at Cafe Think catalyzed a partnership and forged their big idea: EdVisorly. 

EdVisorly is an edtech software application designed to ease the university transfer process for community college students. By improving the transfer process, EdVisorly promises to create greater access to education, support community college recruitment, boost enrollment, and improve university transfer rates. 

The EdVisorly team consists of eight California Community College transfer students, five international students, and three graduate students. They all noticed flaws within the California higher education system that could only be experienced first hand: an underlying caste system divided by socioeconomic status, race, gender, and nationality. Their solution is to create a more transparent and accessible program to alleviate the process for disadvantaged folks — simply put, EdVisorly is made for students, by students.   

According to a 2018 study by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), ten million undergraduates were enrolled in public two-year colleges in the United States, with over two million in the California Community College (CCC) system. 

Yet transfer rates from community colleges to four-year programs are very low. Only 18 percent of community college students actually transfer to universities within four years of matriculation. In California, the number is more staggering: 70 percent of students enrolled in the CCC system will neither earn a two-year associate’s degree nor transfer to a four-year college. Many of these students are underrepresented and underserved in higher education, oftentimes from lower income households, students of color, first generation college students, or parents. 

Access to higher education provides a pipeline for upward mobility and equal opportunity. However, in part due to an overburdened administration, CCC students are not given adequate support and resources to obtain consistent university transfer guidance. An overburdened community college faculty, combined with evolving legislation for outcome-driven funding, aggravates the divide.

“There seems to be a lack of cohesion between the districts in the CCC space, which is ineffectual in higher education,” EdVisorly Business Development Lead Hanna Ving says. “If we strive for real progress, we cannot innovate at the pace of bureaucracy. We must instead perform at the pace of students’ needs and demands.” 

Lizzie Allison, a UC Berkeley Haas student and EdVisorly’s Marketing Director, was recruited to bring her own successful entrepreneurial experience to the project. 

“Counselors have an impossible task. My community college had counselors who managed 900 students each, which is an unreasonable workload,” she says. “It’s not necessarily the fault of any individual counselor; they’re overloaded. Making the transfer process easier and more effective for students will make a significant difference in the long term benefit to students, community colleges, universities, and the broader California economy.” 

Essentially, the system has asymmetric and inaccessible information for students, perpetuating an inequitable cycle within higher education. So in creating EdVisorly, their goal was to pivot the focus towards students and create a centralized platform to universalize higher education and fight the status quo. 

EdVisorly offers three-fold innovation: a planning software for students to map out a timeline of courses to prepare for the transfer process; a FAFSA completion widget that uses AI to fill out the complicated and tedious form; and an analytics platform that provides administrators with valuable insights in how schools can increase enrollment, retention, graduation, and transfer rates. It’s designed to democratize access to education by decreasing transfer misinformation and modernizing the student experience. Their focus stays at the student level, prioritizing student success. 

“We want to stay student-focused and students first above all,” says Content Marketing Manager Brandon Ricci. “But we recognize that it’s not just students that can benefit. Our product will help retention rates, so there’s a huge value add for schools in keeping students around who might have dropped out because of misinformation and miscommunication.”

Data Architect Diyah Mettupalli says, “Our solution will also increase future community college population sizes because of the de-stigmatization around the ‘transfer route.’ Basically, we help students, which in turn helps the schools.” 

Currently, EdVisorly is beta-testing across the California Community College student ecosystem, starting with individual students. Their target market now is now California, with a massive community college infrastructure and huge demand for such an innovation. 

Smith recalls, “I remember people asking me, ‘There’s a market for this?’

“I thought to myself, those in the MBA program don’t even understand how hard it is to navigate as a transfer student to Haas. Only a handful of my peers in my cohort went to community college, which highlights the long-term systemic inequities that community college students face in the current higher education ecosystem. And learning that there was only a five percent success rate for community college students just seemed criminal.” 

Since EdVisorly’s time with the Big Ideas program, the team has gone on to enter the Berkeley SkyDeck Hot Desk cohort, the Berkeley Venture Impact Fellows (BVIP) AMP Accelerator, the IVP Haas Seed Fund, the TechStars Launchpad Fellowship, and now UC Launch. These programs, along with the continued support of Big Ideas mentor Steven Horowitz, have been pivotal in helping perfect the product. 

“I thought Manny and Alyson’s initial idea had great potential for social impact,” Horowitz says. “They’ve consistently proven me right. I continue to be impressed with the team’s commitment, compassion, sincerity, and intelligence. I’m proud of what they’ve accomplished so far, and look forward to EdVisorly’s continued growth.”

However, it hasn’t been all smooth-sailing for the team. Like any start-up, the student-led team ran into obstacles. UC Riverside Computer Science student and software lead, Divyanshi Srivastava, works a lot with data and oversees challenges on a daily basis. 

“There are so many hurdles because we are trying to compile information from all of these sources and present them in a reliable, optimal way,” she says. “There are so many discrepancies that currently exist with inaccessible information. Currently, there are resources, none of which are reliable. We’re constantly adapting to new challenges, and taking everything as a learning experience.” 

The team is using their funding towards not only software development, but also completing optimization and implementing more focus groups. Their passion for this project makes no problem too large. 

Smith emphasizes the importance of a great team. “Surround yourself with the right people and the right support systems, and then do what you’re passionate about. Be willing to sacrifice for it.” 

EdVisorly is just getting started. Their momentum is nothing to underestimate. They credit a lot of their traction to the fact that they had experience with the higher educational system. They are turning their utopian ideal of an unbiased, accessible, universalized education system into a working reality, all by disrupting the current system and improving upon it. 

UC Berkeley Computer Science and Technical Product Manager Wajiha Zahid says, “While some people may see attending community college instead of going to a four-year directly as a weakness, EdVisorly sees it as one of your biggest strengths.”

It began with a D cell battery, a couple of nails, and a styrofoam dinner plate in the garage of Professor Ashok Gadgil, a UC Berkeley Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty member since 2007.

Twenty years ago, Gadgil was struck by the problem of arsenic contamination in groundwater. By the early 2000s, the arsenic issue grew to affect about 100 million people worldwide. Today, that number has risen to 200 million. 

Arsenic is a potent carcinogen that can materialize in groundwater, highly toxic when the water is used for drinking purposes. The World Health Organization reports arsenic-contaminated water as one of the greatest threats to public health in the world. Arsenic is naturally present at high levels in groundwater in a number of countries, including Bangladesh, India, Mexico, and the United States of America. In most areas, the arsenic concentration in groundwater is low enough for safe consumption. However, groundwater in problem areas with higher arsenic levels need rigorous treatment, which is expensive or difficult to administer on a large scale.

“Nobody had solved the problem of removing arsenic in an affordable way, and that was a challenge that seemed worth tackling,” said Gadgil. “It seemed that this problem was just being ignored, or very unsatisfactory solutions were offered due to the political and economic powerlessness of these people.This is a classic situation we encounter around the world, and it doesn’t seem right.” 

In an attempt to find a solution, Ashok started experimenting with an idea that came out of MIT — allowing iron nails to rust in water and using that rust to capture arsenic. The problem was, this solution wasn’t viable on a large scale and failed altogether for high concentrations of arsenic. The rate at which iron nails rust is small compared to the rate at which arsenic must be captured from the water that flows past the nails. The MIT system works only for marginally elevated arsenic contamination, and that too works only on very small scale flows.

In that garage, Gadgil had an epiphany: electricity can be used to control the rate at which iron rusts. The iron nails became a long wire of iron and eventually, large steel plates. 

Susan Amrose, Case van Genuchten, Caroline Delaire, Siva Banduru, Sara Glade, and Dana Hernandez, UC Berkeley doctoral students, became interested in the issues related to the science, engineering, technology design, scale up, field testing, and full-scale implementation of the idea. All were, at one time or another, in the core technical team. Around that time, Hernandez scouted fellow students in a course offered through UC Berkeley’s Master of Development Practice to lead the business development and social impact evaluation aspects of the project. 

Their team currently consists of nine undergraduate and graduate students. Three team members are Civil and Environmental Engineering graduate students, four are engineering undergraduates, and two are computer science or data science majors.

The biggest initial discovery the team made was how to convert arsenic into its most capturable form: arsenic V. They discovered that arsenic III, which is extremely hard to capture, naturally converts to arsenic V through the iron rust process. After this discovery, there was no looking back; the ElectroChemical Arsenic Remediation project (ECAR) was born. 

“In many ways, we found lucky breaks that nature’s own chemistry provides, like the fact that oxygen from air dissolves in water naturally, which pushes arsenic III into arsenic V during natural conversion of iron rust in water from Fe(II) to Fe(III),” says Gadgil. “Nobody expected that and nobody knew that. But the point was to take calculated risks and try things. And here we are.”

Banduru joined the project in India as a field engineer in 2011, quitting his teaching job in the middle of the academic year. After two years, he came to Berkeley to do his Ph.D. work.  

“What motivated me to work on ECAR is the simplicity, effectiveness, and robustness of the technology,” Banduru says, now a postdoc at Berkeley. He is now the technical design lead of ECAR. 

Hernandez joined in 2016 after earning her masters at UC Berkeley as a field engineer, and is now a project director for developing and field testing more advanced versions of ECAR in California’s Central Valley.

“Being there for this phase of the project, seeing all the years of work, and then also addressing challenges that come up when scaling up a technology that works quite effectively in the lab but has unanticipated challenges in the field is very exciting” Hernandez says. “We solve those issues and adapt and work together in this very large, multidisciplinary team.” 

ECAR is meant to remove arsenic from large amounts of groundwater in an affordable, sustainable, and accessible way. It’s unlike any other arsenic removal systems in the market, as it is a zero liquid discharge technology (ZLD), the dream of all water-treatment designers. ZLD means that all incoming water molecules show up in the outcoming stream, with all contaminants removed as solids. ZLD effectively means there is zero water waste. Most ZLD technologies remain unaffordable, but ECAR is.  

In 2016, the team started field operations of their full-scale demonstration plant in rural West Bengal, India. In only nine months of monitoring, they demonstrated that the plant had reduced the arsenic concentration from 250 parts per billion in raw water to three parts per billion. ECAR’s technology has become an essential part of the local community. The plant sells arsenic-safe drinking water so that all costs are covered, and the operating company (an Indian licensee of the ECAR patent which is owned by the Regents of the University of California) gets a modest profit. More importantly, those living locally can purchase large quantities of water at a small fraction of their income. Safe drinking water that meets all relevant WHO, US EPA, and Indian regulations for drinking water is sold for about one cent US per liter. It’s a win-win for folks living in these communities.

The next generation of ECAR, called Air-Cathode Assisted Iron Electrocoagulation (ACAIE), was developed in 2019 with the help of the Big Ideas Contest, an annual competition based at the Blum Center at UC Berkeley and open to all University of California students.

“Big Ideas is extraordinarily important to get something done,” Gadgil says. “You need somebody who says, ‘Yeah, that might work, we’ll take the risk,’ because the impact might be very big and it’s easy for an idea to die at its most nascent stage.” 

ACAIE is designed to alleviate the arsenic problem in rural California. In 2020, the student team made new developments in the design and implementation of the technology’s reactors. Big Ideas Director Phillip Denny connected undergraduate engineering students to help the team create an app to remotely monitor voltage and current, which are important performance metrics of ACAIE.

“The networking was key for me,” Banduru says. “We were able to reach out to other Big Ideas student winners when we were trying to scale up and received immediate feedback. That was really helpful in our thought process and implementation phase.” 

Though ECAR’s impact has already been massive for a local community, the team aspires to do more. The technology has the potential to dramatically reduce rates of excess internal cancers from drinking arsenic-bearing water. Drinking water with 100 ppb arsenic would cause 70,000 excess cancers in a population of one million. ECAR and ACAIE can bring that number down to 70. Twenty-one million excess deaths can be avoided. 

Big Ideas also helped to streamline the process of testing ACAIE in Allensworth, California. 

Gadgil maintains the journey towards creating and developing ECAR and ACAIE couldn’t have been possible without the interdisciplinary and ambitious student team, without Big Ideas, and without making a few mistakes along the way. 

“There’s a lot of very inspiring people who are so passionate about the work that they’re doing,” says Hernandez. “That just motivates me further to continue pushing our project forward and address the arsenic problem.”