Case Study
$617K in Hidden Waste Exposed When They Were Forced to Look
Fullstack Academy's advisors were burning hours toggling between five disconnected tools. What felt like "just how it works" was actually $617K/year in invisible inefficiency. They only found it when a restructuring forced them to support 3,800 students with fewer staff.
Book a Demo$617K
Annual Savings
3x
Operational Efficiency
50%
Engagement Increase
3,800
Students Supported
The Challenge
Five Tools. Zero Visibility. $617K Bleeding Quietly.
For years, Fullstack Academy's career services team ran on a patchwork of tools: Grad Leaders for some tracking, spreadsheets to fill the gaps, and communication scattered across email, Slack, and phone. Nobody questioned it. This was just how the work got done.
Advisors spent hours every week toggling between platforms, manually compiling reports, and chasing down data that should have been available instantly. That overhead was treated as "the cost of doing business." The true cost, $617K a year in lost advisor capacity, never appeared on any report because no single tool could see across all five.
Then came the 2024 restructuring. Fullstack Academy suddenly had to support up to 3,800 students with fewer staff. The waste that had always been there became impossible to absorb. The inefficiency didn't get worse. It just finally became visible.
The Solution
One Platform to Replace Them All
Unified Platform
Prentus replaced Grad Leaders and every supplementary tool with a single system of record. Advisors gained a comprehensive view of every student's journey from enrollment through employment, all in one dashboard.
Centralized Resource Hub
Career resources, job postings, and learning materials lived in one accessible location. Students no longer had to hunt across multiple platforms to find the support they needed.
Real-Time Analytics
Comprehensive tracking and reporting gave leadership 100% data-driven decision making. Engagement metrics, outcome rates, and advisor workloads were all visible in real time, eliminating the need for manual report compilation.
Streamlined Communication
In-platform messaging replaced the web of emails, Slack messages, and phone calls. Every conversation was logged, searchable, and tied to the student's profile for full context at all times.
The Results
Dramatic Efficiency Gains at Scale
3x
Operational Efficiency
Each advisor had been doing one-third productive work and two-thirds platform juggling. The tool fragmentation was eating 66% of their capacity without anyone realizing it. Once consolidated, each advisor could handle 3x their caseload because the hidden drag was removed.
100%
Data-Driven Decisions
Leadership had been making decisions based on manually assembled quarterly reports from five different sources. They thought they had visibility. They didn't. Critical patterns in student engagement were invisible until everything fed into one real-time dashboard.
50%
Student Engagement Increase
Half of potential student engagement was being lost to friction. Students had to navigate multiple platforms to find resources, and many just gave up. The 50% engagement jump didn't come from adding features. It came from removing the barriers that were silently suppressing participation.
0
Legacy Tools Remaining
Every tool they eliminated was a place where data fell through cracks, context got lost, and advisor time disappeared. The real cost of Grad Leaders wasn't its subscription fee. It was the invisible tax on every interaction that touched it.
The platform gave us what our previous tools never could: a single view of every student. We went from juggling five systems to having everything we need in one place.
Career Services Leadership
Fullstack Academy
Scale Your Career Services Without Scaling Cost
See how Prentus can help your institution achieve the same efficiency gains that saved Fullstack Academy over $600K annually.