There are two new Web sites that are making choosing a college more interactive. Cappex and Zinch are like Match.com for universities and students, combining the personal profiling of Facebook with the ability to search for perfect mates based on specific criteria.
On the sites, students build profile pages about themselves. They can include pictures, videos, and stories to attract college admissions officers. The profiles also help the sites provide recommendations to the students about colleges that may be good fits. The student likes graphic design and playing the cello? Perhaps XYZ University is the one for them, as it has strong visual arts and music programs. The student is into pole-vaulting? Check out ABC University’s page on track and field!
The students’ profiles also facilitate scholarship matches, a definite value-add. When students sign up, they get inboxes to receive messages from both the site and the universities. It doesn’t take long for those inboxes to fill up with virtual brochures, links to official college Web sites, and scholarship info.
On the other side, the universities can create their own profiles and actively search for students to target with recruiting brochures and other marketing collateral. For example, perhaps Baylor University foresees a shortage of applicants to its music program and wants to target cello players in its recruitment. A Baylor representative can log on and search for students who have highlighted cello as an interest. This is a departure from the way universities typically find students, through lists purchased from the college entrance exams ACT and SAT. In fact, Zinch and Cappex position their services as ways to add dimension to high school students, who are traditionally viewed as and judged by their test scores alone before they actually submit an application.
The colleges’ profiles also act to build communities of prospective students. Students who are interested in particular schools can find one another online to swap stories and show support in what is certainly a stressful time. In the Talent Show section of Zinch, students interested in the Art Institutes comment on each other’s creative photos and illustrations.
As on Facebook, the universities try to illustrate a picture of campus life in their profiles to both inform and attract prospective students. College representatives post entries about football victories and freshman class picnics as they vie for the attention of high schoolers shopping for the ultimate college experience.
Cappex and Zinch are growing in terms of popularity. Zinch lists 727 participating colleges, and Cappex claims to provide information on more than three thousand universities. Each has thousands of students announcing their college candidacy as well. The sites are great tools for researching colleges and provide an attractive alternative to the mountains of snail mail that usually end up in mailboxes when students near their senior years. Hopefully, online recruitment will eventually replace the environmentally unfriendly marketing techniques of my day.