College admissions season is here, as high school seniors (and highly prepared juniors) finalize their list of universities and start spending evenings and weekends filling out the seemingly endless number of applications. It's hours and hours of work, all in the hope of getting into that first-choice school. But what's important when picking a school? And what should you call out in your application? And how do you write the daunting personal essay?
On Wednesday, Unigo launched an online service called Absolute Admit to help students figure it all out. It's essentially the QuickBooks of the college admissions process, guiding students through each step -- from the search to the resume, essay, and even terms used throughout the application forms.
"Too many people try to wing the college admissions process and they try to go with their gut," Unigo CEO Jordan Goldman told Wired. "But as the admissions process becomes more competitive, going with your gut puts you at a disadvantage."
Unigo is one of the largest college search and review sites, with more than 1 million unique monthly visitors. It has more than 250,000 free college reviews and 1,000 college counselors available for one-on-one online counseling sessions. With Absolute Admit, Unigo has worked with admissions officers from schools like Columbia, Stanford, MIT and UC Berkeley to give students a comprehensive, one-stop adaptive online course that covers everything you'd need and want to know about the application process.
The program uses crowdsourced data from more than 760,000 college applications to help students identify where and how they can improve their applications. Specifically, Absolute Admit consists of 12 online courses, starting with the college search and ending with a course titled "Acceptance, Rejection, Waitlist." There are more than 200 online videos in which students and counselors discuss their experiences and what applicants should do to make themselves stand out. The course is also adaptive, in that it takes users' particular interests into consideration, tailoring the program based on the type of schools and programs they're applying to and their personal academic background.
Goldman says that the current college counseling system is broken. He claims that students have access to either extremely limited free high school counseling or pricey private counseling that can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $40,000. Absolute Admit aims for the middle ground. Pricing for the full course starts at $200, while $250 buys the course plus one hour of counseling, and $600 brings five hours of counseling. The company also partners with nonprofits to offer Absolute Admissions free to low-income students.
