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Admitted.ly, A College Counseling Service, Launches Today To Level The Admissions Playing Field
Applying to college is confusing. Straight up. Especially so when your only reference points are a copy of the Fiske Guide To Colleges and an over-booked guidance counselor.
Admitted.ly, one of ten startups to present at the Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator (ERA) demo day yesterday in New York, is out to give more students access to low-cost, informative college counseling when they might otherwise have none. The startup launches a free version of its site today, with additional paid features coming in January.
As Admitted.ly CEO and founder Jess Brondo pointed out, the average ratio of high schoolers to college counselors is 476 to 1. And that’s only among the 27% of high schools that have a dedicated college advisor. Brondo has been in the college advising game for a while, having been a private counselor and founded The Edge In College Prep, an online test prep company.
The idea behind Admitted.ly is to fill in those gaps by tracking students from their freshman year of high school through the application process in their senior year, an uncommonly proactive approach to guidance counseling. As Brondo explained, the aim is to get students thinking a few years ahead. If they want to be the editor of their school paper, it’s better to start writing as a freshman than as a sophomore.
The startup will ultimately offer services for students, parents, and college counselors. The team has also been at work on a mobile app, because we all know how much those kids love their cellular phones. Pricing runs on a flat fee or a monthly subscription under $10.
When it comes time to begin looking seriously at schools, Admitted.ly uses a personality quiz and extracurricular and GPA data to offer recommendations for colleges and universities to consider. The personality quiz speaks more to lifestyle than anything else. If a student identifies as non-religious, Admitted.ly isn’t going to match them with a Christian university.
For any given match, Admitted.ly will tell the student if it’s a reach, a target school, or a likely. It will also offer advice on how to improve your odds.
Matching students to schools flips the typical dynamic of the college search. For many that involves flipping through the Fiske Guide or US News & World Report, an approach operates on the assumption that the student already knows what they want in a school.
Between test prep, guide books, and $50,000 private counselors, Admitted.ly is looking to cut into a $6 billion market. Brondo announced onstage that Admitted.ly has landed a contract with a 75,000-student school district, which they will be onboarding come mid-November.
While college admissions will always be something of a crap shoot, any tool that better educates students about their options and improves their odds of admission is a very good thing. We’ll be looking to see how that first cohort fares with the service.
Motorola Hiring For New Engineering Office In Waterloo – BlackBerry's Loss Is Google's Gain
Motorola is “ready to go on a hiring spree” in Waterloo, the home of BlackBerry HQ, according to a new report from the Financial Post. The Google-owned maker of smartphones already has an existing, small office in the heart of one of Canada’s most important tech hubs, but plans to build a proper, full-fledged engineering team in the area.
BlackBerry is going to be shedding a lot of talent, very quickly, as it plans to lay off around 4,500 people over the course of the next little while. Motorola wouldn’t tell the FP that those layoffs specifically had anything to do with its decision to expand in Waterloo, but did comment that “it’s not always easy to find places that have significant tech talent in a variety of areas, but especially mobile.” Given BlackBerry’s focus, it’s very likely he’s referring to the abundance of engineers located in the region with smartphone experience.
Waterloo is already an area with high demand for engineering talent. The startup ecosystem in the region is vibrant, and those young companies all need engineers to build their products. VC investment is rolling in for companies in the area, which means more competition than ever for graduates of the University of Waterloo, one of the most highly respected engineering schools in the world. Other sizeable tech companies have also expressed newfound interest in the area, with Square announcing just last week it would open offices in BlackBerry’s backyard.
Google has other interests in the area, too. Its office in Waterloo has contributed considerably to the development of Chrome and Chrome OS, and there’s a specific focus on mobile for its team there, including the mobile counterparts of Gmail and Google Docs. Considering the Google Waterloo team’s focus on mobile software, it makes sense that Google would want its Motorola mobile hardware unit nearby.
BlackBerry and its ongoing demise (yes, I’m totally comfortable calling it that at this point) is not going to be a great thing for the Waterloo region by any means, and a lot of people are going to suffer as a result of the company’s collapse. But this move by Motorola shows that the core of what makes it such a successful tech hub remains intact, and will call other big players to fill the void the smartphone pioneer is leaving behind.
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