The Insiders' Guide to College
Dodie Ownes -- School Library Journal, 2/4/2009
Time to select a school? Traditionally, college-bound students have turned to guidance counselors, catalogs, and popular magazines’ “best of” lists. But since the experts aren’t actually attending classes and interacting with profs, they often can’t pinpoint the best schools for kids. That’s why Jordan Goldman founded Unigo.com, a free Web site that offers prospective preppies college reviews and videos written and produced “by students, for students.”How many schools have you covered?
Our fall 2008 launch featured the most notable 250 institution. Getting to that 250 took about eight months. Three months were spent doing analysis on which colleges and universities to put at the top of the list. Then we spent another five months interviewing students and getting the content ready to go. At each institution, we were careful to include a wide range of the student body, usually about 10 percent, to ensure diversity. To get to this point, we spoke to 1,500 students, which resulted in 35,000 entries in Unigo.com.
What’s your ultimate goal?
We are now working toward having coverage of all 4,000 U.S. institutions of higher education. Unigo.com has 18 editors, and each has a portfolio of 10 schools. These editors do on campus and telephone interviews, read the student newspaper and blogs, press coverage, alumni magazines, etc … and apply rigorous research and editorial standards to everything we publish. If someone comes to our Web site now and finds that a college that she is interested has not had content added yet, it is possible to add a ‘watch’ to it from a user profile, and an alert will be sent out as soon as information is added. We recently sent out Flip video cameras to our on campus interns, and are now adding videos to institutional entries, which also differentiates us from the more tried and true college guides.
Are there any new features you’re thinking of adding?
Two items that are on the top of the list are a financial aid calculator, and an interactive calendar that would prompt users on test and application deadlines based on their year in high school. We can all use a little reminder now and then!
