When Andrew Hunt '10 was researching and applying to colleges, he found that current students were always the best resource for admission advice. Based on that experience, Hunt is now spearheading a student-run college admission Web site and admission service called Scholars for Students, which is set to launch at the end of September.
The goal of the Web site, according to Hunt, is to make college advising, applications and admission a "more affordable, friendly and smarter process in general."
The site will rely on current college students who work as "scholars." It will eventually include blogs by each scholar in which prospective applicants can leave comments, as well as a chat feature applicants can use to communicate with the scholars. Applicants will also be able to create a free account in which they can indicate which schools they plan to apply to. Based on the information in their account, they will then be able to read discussions and post in various "discussion pools" specific to each college or university.
Those applicants who choose to purchase a site membership will be assigned a specific scholar to counsel and advise them throughout the year - from application writing in September to admission decisions in March and April.
Hunt said he first came up with the idea for Scholars for Students last year when he was perusing the popular college admission Web site College Confidential. "It's an awesome site with great information, and people get obsessed with it," Hunt said. "But it's not very well organized." The other option - hiring a consultant - is beyond the financial means of many students.
"Why hire a college consultant for $200 per hour?" Hunt said. "It's ridiculous." Hunt said a scholar's advice and guidance would cost only $550 for the whole year, which he called "pretty reasonable, compared to $3,000 for a year with a college consultant."
Hunt worked 50 hours a week during the summer, teaching SAT courses and writing SAT prep questions to raise money for the project. He said all the work has been worthwhile so far and that general feedback for the site has been "overwhelmingly positive." Though the site's scholars are currently all Brown students, Hunt said he hopes to expand the service to include scholars from other colleges, assuming the Web site's launch is successful.
Eva Shultis '10 has worked with Hunt on preliminary drafts of text and ideas for the site. "I occasionally have an idea, but mostly it's all him," Shultis demurred, in reference to Hunt. After the site is formally launched, Shultis will be in charge of editing the scholars' blogs.
"I think the idea has enormous potential, though it might take some time for it to really take off," Shultis said.
James Miller '73, dean of admission at Brown, agreed that the site could be successful, saying it seemed like a "wonderful" resource for people. "There is, nationally, a glaring lack of college advice for students in certain parts of the country and in certain school systems," Miller said. "A low-cost, clearly-organized site would be wonderful. I'd be very impressed."
Christina Santana '11 also thought Scholars for Students could be a great resource. "Coming from a public high school," she said, "my guidance counselors stank."
Santana said the approximately 1,600 students at her high school shared only four guidance counselors, so advice regarding college admission was extremely limited. Santana said she consulted College Confidential occasionally, and the site was "entertaining" and "kept her attention." But she also found it somewhat poorly organized. "It would have been great to have someone looking over my applications and answering questions during the process," Santana said.
As a first year international student at Brown, Eun-Young Jeong '11 also said a resource like Scholars for Students would have been helpful when she was applying to colleges. Because she went to high school in Vienna, Austria, she had limited access to information about the American "college experience."
"Though I did get information about application deadlines," Jeong said, "I had no real sense of what each college was like." Jeong said a site such as Scholars for Students could be helpful for international students coming from schools with less information regarding the U.S. college admissions process.
Dawn Ferranti, a guidance counselor at Central High School in Providence, was less optimistic about the help such a consulting service could offer high school students. "Because we're a generally low-income, inner-city school," Ferranti said, "the students here don't use those kinds of services."
She said the school already offers many free resources and services for those students who are motivated to take advantage of them, including free SAT prep classes and information sessions on applications and financial aid as well as local college fairs. "If you have to pay anything - even $5 or $10 - a lot of kids just wouldn't use it," Ferranti said.
