SNW INTERVIEW -- Jan 3 -- CollegeNET helps students raise scholarships. I spoke to the CEO and Founder Jim Wolfston. - Mark Brooks
What is the founding story of CollegeNET.com?
CollegeNET.com
today provides scheduling software and admission services to 1300
universities around the country. For a number of years we took some of
the success of our company and turned it into a traditional scholarship
program. We stated the essay topic and students would write on that .
Then we decided who would win the scholarship. In a typical year, we
gave away about $25k in scholarships.
After a number of years sitting around like a bunch of gray beards determining who wins scholarships and who doesn’t, we conjured this idea of a social network where students could cite the topics. Then they could write publicly on those topics and vote for each other. And the students with the most votes at the end of each month would win the scholarships. So that was the genesis of CollegeNET.com.
It’s social networking but with this special purpose of choosing topics, persuading others as to your views, thereby earning their votes. In many respects, it’s like conducting a political campaign.
Can you tell me a bit more about how CollegeNET.com helps students more effectively find funding?
There
is another aspect to CollegeNET.com. Students can search for colleges
by criteria such as tuition costs, proximity to their home, the average
SAT score at the college, and so on. Of
course there are many sites that also do this kind of searching, but
CollegeNET.com also has a scholarship search engine where students can
say, all right, I’m interested in basketball and I have a 4.0 GPA, tell me the scholarships that might match up with that skill set.
What CollegeNET offers beyond this is this direct benefit of participating with other students investigating the topics of the day and writing about them and thereby earning votes towards scholarship money. So CollegeNET.com isn’t just a search engine for schools or search engine for other traditionally awarded scholarships, it is itself a scholarship generator.
Can you tell us more about how you seeded the community initially?
It
wasn’t hard because students need money for college. We’ve seen the
astronomical growth of student lending and that’s in large part due to
the tuition gap. The rate of tuition increase has far outpaced growth
in the consumer price index here in the United States. So to make up
the difference, students have had to turn more aggressively to student
loans, grants, scholarships. So as soon as we put the money out there
and said “hey look we’re going to give you $15,000 this month”, within
a couple of hours people started posting to earn that money. And the
site has grown ever since to the point now where we have tens of
thousands of students competing for the money. In any given month we
have hundreds of thousands of unique users.
How do you make money?
The
original intent of the site was to figure out an efficient way for
CollegeNET.com to save money in terms of administering its own
scholarships. So we achieved that handsomely. We also have advertising
on the site. The site is a very popular place for advertisers who want
to reach the 18 to 24 demographic without being intrusive.
We also have this very interesting thing that is just starting to happen. Last fall, our first external sponsor of scholarships augmented the $15,000 a month that we provide. Now sponsors can put forward money and can specify extra criteria that the student must meet to qualify for their scholarship. That’s proven to be of great interest and we’re working with some additional potential providers at this point.
What do you have in the works for the next 6 months for CollegeNET.com?
The
thing that you’re going to see more from CollegeNET.com is just more
money. That is going to come from the sponsor contracts that we’re
working on right now. As I said, foundations, other organizations,
companies like ours that give out scholarship money are going to mix
into their program CollegeNET’s social networking for their college
scholarships. I think that is a very exciting development that will
benefit everybody all the way around.
