The typical student in a Risepoint-supported program is already at work. More than 90% of them are working adults: nurses picking up a graduate credential between shifts, teachers finishing a master’s degree in the evenings, managers adding an MBA without stepping away from a paycheck. For those students, an online program at a nearby regional university is often the only version of school that fits.
So there’s a certain symmetry in the news that Risepoint, the global education technology company that supports those programs, has been recognized for how well its own employees are able to balance work and everything else. On Sept. 29, the company announced three new Comparably Best Places to Work awards: Happiest Employees, Best Perks & Benefits, and
Best Work-Life Balance.
The honors come straight from the people who work there. Comparably, a ZoomInfo company, builds its awards from anonymous ratings submitted by current employees, and for this cycle it collected them over a full year, from Aug. 24, 2025, to Aug. 24, 2026. Nobody applies. No panel reads nominations. Each company is compared against organizations of similar size, and the pool behind this round included 20 million ratings across 70,000 companies.
A company without an office
Risepoint doesn’t have a headquarters in the conventional sense. Its more than 1,400 employees work remotely across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, and the company describes itself as remote-first.
That arrangement has obvious appeal. It removes the commute, and it lets people live where their families and lives already are. It also brings its own risks. At home, the workday can stretch in both directions, and a laptop on the kitchen table is never really closed. Time zones that span an ocean make it harder still to find the end of the day. The connection that forms around an office coffee machine has to be recreated through deliberate effort, or it doesn’t form at all.
According to the company’s announcement, Risepoint has kept adjusting how its employees connect, grow, and work together. It has given people flexibility in how and where they work. It has invested in benefits and resources meant to support employees at different stages of life and career. And it has created opportunities for employees to build relationships with one another and shape the company’s culture.
Comparably’s Best Work-Life Balance category is where those efforts would show up first. The award looks at hours worked, breaks, time off, and burnout, which are exactly the pressure points of a distributed job.
“Space for the people and priorities that matter”
Fernando Bleichmar, Risepoint CEO, framed the awards around that same balance.
“We want our employees to be able to do impactful work while having the flexibility and support they need in their lives outside of work,” he said. “That means feeling connected to why their work matters, supported by their teams, and able to make space for the people and priorities that matter to them.”
The phrase about making space is doing a lot of work in that sentence. For a company whose business is helping working adults fit education into lives that are already full, it describes the employee experience in almost the same terms as the student experience.
What the students are balancing
The comparison isn’t only rhetorical. Risepoint helps regional universities launch and grow online programs, primarily in fields such as nursing, healthcare, teaching, business, technology, and public service. The degrees belong to the universities, which own the curriculum, admissions, instruction, and financial aid, and the courses are taught by the same faculty who teach on campus. Risepoint supplies the technology behind the programs, integrated marketing and initial student outreach, enrollment support, and student retention services.
Students choose these programs because they can keep their lives intact while they study. In a 2025 independent study by Ipsos of Risepoint-supported graduates, 92% agreed that their online degree let them keep living and working in their local communities. Just over half finished without taking on debt, and graduates reported that tuition tended to pay for itself within about a year and a half through higher earnings.
The employees supporting those students work within the same constraint in reverse. Their job is to make an education fit around someone’s shift schedule, childcare, and commute. It’s easier to take that seriously when the employer takes the same questions seriously internally.
Happiness, benefits, and the rest of the picture
The other two awards fill in the picture. Happiest Employees is Comparably’s broadest measure, drawing on feedback about the work environment, compensation and benefits, excitement about work and colleagues, connection to company goals, and company pride. Best Perks & Benefits looks at benefits, paid time off, and other offerings.
Risepoint has been here before. In 2024, the company appeared on Comparably’s Happiest Employees, Best Company Perks & Benefits, and Best Company Work-Life Balance lists. The ratings behind those lists came from a different 12-month window and a different set of responses. Landing in the same categories again means a new year of anonymous employee feedback pointed in the same direction.
This year’s fall awards also sit alongside four Comparably honors Risepoint received in June, for Best Career Growth, Best Leadership Teams, Best Sales Teams, and Best Product & Design Teams. Those spoke to advancement and direction. The September set speaks to the day-to-day.
A year of growth, measured from the inside
The rating period covered a stretch of expansion for the company. In August, Risepoint acquired Keypath Education’s North American operations, adding more than 20 university partnerships and a clinical placement network for online healthcare programs. The Comparably window closed about a week after the deal was announced, so the ratings largely capture the year that led up to it.
Across its partnerships, Risepoint has supported more than 825,000 students, at more than 100 not-for-profit universities and colleges in five countries. Its stated mission is to help universities make education more accessible, modern, and impactful for everyone.
“These awards are especially meaningful because that feedback comes directly from our employees and reflects the experience we are working together to create every day,” Bleichmar said.
A new Comparably cycle is already underway. Every rating that arrives between now and next August will describe a larger company, with new colleagues and new programs, and it will be measured against the same questions about hours, breaks, time off, and whether people still have room for their lives.