Prediction of student performance at early stage in higher education is important for academic society so that strategic decisions can be made before students are placed to keep them from dropping out of the course. Due to India's massive student population and extremely ancient educational system, there are significant difficulties in measuring and forecasting students' performance. Every institution in India has its own unique set of criteria for measuring student achievement, and there is no formal process for keeping track of and evaluating a student's progress and improvement. Over the last decade, researchers in the education domain have presented numerous types of machine learning techniques. However, there are significant obstacles to dealing with imbalanced datasets in order to predict the performance of students. In this paper, the first phase of traditional classification algorithms has been applied to the dataset, which contains the progress of 4424 students. In the second phase, novel hybrid machine learning (ML) algorithms were used to get better predictions. The outcome of the proposed model makes it easier to predict how well students will do so that early decisions can be made about the growth of higher education institutions.