Unigo.com - New US Universities Sites

Thanks to Mark Lee, an alumnus of MIT for sharing with me this link on Unigo.com . This is a large US Universities peer sharing site.

NY Times has an article on it here .

Do check it out! I tried to register just now, but somehow faced problem. Maybe due to my connection or too many people out there trying to go in.
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Broke young college graduates with ideas for awesome new Web sites are about as thick on the ground as pigeons in New York City, but Jordan Goldman has a talent for getting noticed. Born and raised in Staten Island, he graduated from Wesleyan in 2004, spent two post-grad years in England and, upon his return to his native city, lived in 16 different sublets in the next two years. His own parents referred to him as the Wandering Jew. “I was ordering Chinese lunch specials and dividing them into three,” he remembered recently, “and that was my food for days. My mom thought I was nuts. She kept saying, ‘Get a job,’ and I’d say, ‘No, Ma, I have this idea.’ ”

With no money, no contacts and no business education whatsoever, Goldman began where any 21st-century self-starter would: “I Google-searched ‘business plan,’ and I found one and just plugged my own words into it. Then it wound up that Wesleyan has an alumni database, and so I looked for people who worked in finance and who graduated 10 or more years before I did. I e-mailed about 500 people, and I just said: ‘Look, I have this idea. What do I do now? What comes next?’ It was a fairly untraditional fund-raising process.”

Actually, with the exception of the bit about Google, it was as traditional as can be, but given that he was 23, Goldman can be excused for thinking that he discovered the Old Boy Network. About 50 Wesleyan alums answered his e-mail messages, and one of those replies — from Frank Sica, a former president of Soros Private Funds Management — was the stuff of drama.

“He said, ‘I live in Bronxville,’ ” Goldman recounted. “ ‘At 7:30 I order my eggs at this diner. I’m done by 8. Come up to the diner and tell me about your idea, and I’ll give you until I’m done with my eggs.’ ” Armed with only his idea and the ability to talk a blue streak about it, Goldman set his alarm and took a train to that diner. No one who has ever met Goldman would have any trouble guessing that by the time Sica was finished with his eggs that day, he was on his way to becoming the young man’s lead investor.

Now Goldman goes to work every day on Park Avenue, in an office with an interior window through which he can keep tabs on his 25 employees, nearly all of them even younger than he. This month his Web site, called Unigo.com — a free, gigantic, student-generated guide to North American colleges for prospective applicants and their families — went live for the benefit of tens of thousands of trepidatious high-school students as they try to figure out where and how to go to college. Not coincidentally, it also aims to siphon away a few million dollars from the slow-adapting publishers of those elephantine college guidebooks that have been a staple of the high-school experience for decades. A lot of the classic narratives about a young man’s coming of age may seem fatally old-fashioned in the new century, but apparently, Horatio Alger still lives.

One measure of an idea’s greatness is how obvious it seems in retrospect, and Unigo’s central idea — that high-school and college students would much rather learn from one another than from a book — is so self-evident that your first reaction is surprise that no one has acted on it before. As status anxiety has helped to drive college applications to record levels, the college-guidebook industry has expanded along with it, stoking those anxieties in order to sell you a way to assuage them, most conspicuously through their merciless numerical ranking of the colleges by every metric they can plausibly invent (“Most Millionaire Graduates,” “Top 10 Schools You’ve Never Heard Of”). But over the years, the handful of major players in the guidebook business — a group that includes The Princeton Review, Fiske, Peterson’s and especially the rankings-granddaddy, U.S. News & World Report — have enlarged their operations without really adapting them to the habits of a generation whose first, and often only, source for information is the Internet. The guidebook publishers all have decent Web sites, but since the ultimate purpose of those Web sites is to sell the books, they have little choice but to be parsimonious about how much information they give out for free.

On Unigo, the information is all free — “free,” of course, understood as a synonym for “accompanied by advertisements” — and with the exception of brief editorial overviews of each of the 267 colleges featured at start-up, all of it is voluntarily provided by current students at those colleges. “For so long, the colleges have been able to have this stranglehold on the P.R. image of their school,” Goldman said recently in his office, decorated boy-workaholic-style with nothing but an open box of Frosted Flakes and a toy robotic dinosaur. “It’s just harder to look at them as the main source of information. If you’re a college student, you are as much of an expert on being a student at that college as anyone.”

The beauty part is that Unigo has not only declined to enlist the colleges’ help with this “national grass-roots movement,” as Goldman likes to refer to it, but the company has also kept it a secret from them. Unigo started soliciting input directly from students (under a kind of Internet alias, “bystudents.com”) almost a year ago, and to date it has received more than 30,000 individual bits of content — primarily reviews in the form of responses to an essay-based questionnaire, but also photos, videos, uploaded writing samples, etc. — all before publicly unveiling the site or even the real name. So how many of these contributions will ultimately be chosen for inclusion on the site?

Goldman looked surprised by the question. “All of them,” he said.

And that is the plane on which it is simply impossible for the traditional guidebooks to compete. Even the most student-oriented book — “The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges” published annually by the staff of The Yale Daily News, to take one example — is forced by space considerations into a shorthand style reminiscent of a Zagat’s restaurant review: student quotes are cherry-picked on the basis of how representative they are of respondents’ opinions as a whole. Unigo, though, can host so much more material than even the fattest book that there is no burden on anyone’s opinion to be in any way representative of anything. On the contrary, it is free to be as idiosyncratic and intemperate as college life itself. (Unigo’s editorial overviews make use of those Zagat’s style quotelets as well, but each quote will function as a hyperlink to the full-length review and from there to the reviewer’s personal profile.)

“There’s a nuance to colleges,” said a Unigo editor, Nikki Martinez, who graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara two years ago. “One of the colleges I’m responsible for is U.S.C. Forty thousand kids. Their reputation is pretty much for football. So my intern there submits a video about this little taco truck they have in the parking lot. I have a lot of friends who went to U.S.C., and the second I mention it they’re all like: ‘Oh, my God, the taco truck! I’m so glad you got the taco truck!’ ”

The textual content on the site takes many forms, but it all essentially adopts the tone and language and casual, critical spirit of an online product review. Even the most boosterish appraisals are often wonderfully unguarded. It is diverting to imagine the reactions of admissions officers nationwide as they read testimonials like this one from an undergraduate at Louisiana State University: “We can drink any college under the table and do it with some class and hospitality.” Or this, from a current Cornell student: “I tend not to blame the suicides on the school. As for blaming suicides on the weather: if you’re that cold, then buy a jacket, for God’s sake. It’s much less messy, and you don’t have to write a note first.”

It is possible to have your contribution rejected, at least in theory. But the extent to which Unigo abides by this anything-goes principle is bracing. A student at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, for instance, writes approvingly in his review that it is still “a white school.” The Unigo staff members shrug it off. “If that’s the kind of people that are going there,” Martinez said, “people need to know that.”

Said Adam Freelander, a Unigo managing editor: “Even the best guidebooks kind of make it seem like every college in the country is an awesome place to be, no matter who you are. And that’s not true.”

Every student who joins Unigo has a user profile, and while that profile might not feature his or her real name, the idea is that by garnering a few pieces of personal information — your major, your hometown, your race, sex and political leanings — a database is created that makes it possible for newcomers to search the site by all kinds of hyperspecific criteria. You can see how many other people from your own high school are looking at a particular college. You can contact the author of a review with follow-up questions. “You can say, ‘I only want to see reviews of Harvard by African-American students,’ and have a choice of 20,” Goldman projected, “or by English majors, and have a choice of 50. So you can not only see a more comprehensive version of the school than you can anywhere else, but you can also see the school through the eyes of someone who’s just like you.”

The idea of letting students write, or at least contribute to, college guides is not brand new; in fact, the one significant modernization in the guidebook business in the last decade or so is the vogue for books that feature students’ contributions alongside those of objective “experts.” It is a vogue for which Goldman, despite his tender years, can already claim a fair amount of credit. He is the co-editor of “The Students’ Guide to Colleges,” a project he began freshman year in his dorm room at Wesleyan using nothing more than his own ingratiating manner and boundless energy to hire unpaid interns on 100 college campuses nationwide. They helped him to attract their fellow students’ attention to the long-form, essay-based survey Goldman then posted online, offering only the promise that the three best responses to these surveys would be chosen to represent the authors’ schools in print. By the time he graduated, the Penguin edition of “The Students’ Guide” was selling solidly, but the book’s success, as well as its limitations, got Goldman thinking about what might be wrought on a grander scale.

“My whole family chipped in for me to go to college,” he said. “They were saving from when I was 2 or 3 years old. That the best resource for a four-year, $200,000 decision are these books — with no photos, no videos, no interactivity, only three to five pages per school on average, fully updated usually once every several years — just doesn’t make the grade. This is the most important decision people that age have ever made, and the information is just not there.”

In early August, with the site code complete and the tens of thousands of individual pieces of content laboriously loaded onto it, a loosely organized parade of small focus groups, recruited via Craigslist, began to drop by the Unigo office. A pair of high-school juniors from Rye Country Day School in Westchester County were paid $25 each to spend an hour or so navigating the site, pronounced it awesome, something they would immediately tell their friends about, leaving Goldman and the others beaming in the conference room afterward.

Each Unigo editor has a list of 10 colleges (including, always, his or her own alma mater) to oversee; their most important task may be finding an unpaid intern on each campus willing to act as a liaison and an occasional reality-checker for Unigo’s efforts. The real masterstroke, though, was the purchase of a hundred Flip video cameras, which were delivered to the on-campus interns themselves with a minimum of instructions. The results are not only vivid in a way no guidebook can match but also, in the way of the generation that produced them, often guilelessly intimate.

A white student looks back on her decision to attend the historically black Howard University. Two girls at Notre Dame, one an official campus tour guide, visit several spots around campus: at each one, the tour guide gives you the approved spiel, and then her friend tells you what the spiel leaves out. At Wesleyan, the camera goes around a dining hall, and an offscreen student asks the different, socially stratified tables — a table full of jocks, a table full of hipsters — to talk about student stereotypes. A Princeton student sitting on a dorm-room couch, his face almost entirely obscured by a hoodie, talks about the difference between racial and socioeconomic diversity and why Princeton may excel at the first but fails at the second.

“In the ‘Fiske Guide,’ ” said Max Baumgarten, a Unigo editor, “it’ll say ‘the University of Wisconsin sits on these lakes,’ right, and you’re a high-school senior, and you’re like: What do I care that the school is on a few lakes? That means nothing to me. You look at a video, though, and see students hanging out in these beautiful surroundings, and that really changes the game.”

It changes the game from an economic standpoint too: it costs a lot of money to travel far away from home to check out schools, and Unigo offers an unfiltered, detailed, often somewhat eccentric view of campuses all over the country. A 45-second video in which an unseen student pans around the courtyard at Sarah Lawrence on a sunny day and simply describes what she sees (including a student-run barbecue pit called PETA, which stands for “People Eating Tasty Animals”) is so evocative that it makes the one-page U.S. News summary — or the descriptions in Sarah Lawrence’s own admissions catalog, for that matter — read like junk mail.

Unigo’s staff members, as befits their age, do not lack for a sense of the significance of what they are about to unleash on the world. “The colleges are going to have to change what they’re doing,” Martinez said. “The pictures of the kids on the lawn won’t do anymore.”

If so, the colleges remain happily in the dark for now. “I’ve got to be honest with you,” Christopher Gruber, a vice president who oversees admissions at Davidson College, told me. “I’m not spending a ton of time navigating those student-driven sites. It’s too much to manage. My sense is that the traditional big players, like Princeton Review, are the major sources for online information too, in part because those are the names that parents still recognize. Those are the names that are going to have greater panache, and so those are probably the ones that will be turned to. The ones that we supply information to are the ones that we spend the most time on, filling out surveys for them to make sure that that information is accurate.”

In early September, after Unigo offered Davidson and the other 266 colleges a two-week preview of the site — “because we don’t want them to feel ambushed,” Goldman explained — Gruber confirmed that the letter from Goldman was sitting on his desk but said he hadn’t yet found the time to visit the site itself. If he does, he will see reviews, photos and videos by roughly 230 current Davidson students (one-eighth of its entire student body) already posted there.

“I don’t think they know the numbers,” Baumgarten said. “That’s the distinction. The whole package is something they should be a bit scared of, but they’re not. They don’t really understand the immensity of it.”

Unigo’s 25 editors would be the first to acknowledge that their contribution to the site pales in comparison to that of their legion of student contributors. It’s hard to find fault with Goldman’s assertion that this is not just another Web site but a grass-roots phenomenon. But a phenomenon of what nature? If consumer advocacy seems like a strange modern lens to train on what used to be the great desideratum of millions of American families — getting accepted into, and graduating from, a good college, or indeed any college at all — it certainly speaks to the great leveling that the Internet has wrought in terms of consumption. “If you look at it,” Goldman said, “you can review anything online. You can review the most trivial things, but you can’t review your college. There’s no platform for this incredibly important decision that costs so much money.”

College, in other words, is at a certain point in your life the ultimate product, and the first truth with which its current and prospective students are concerned is truth in advertising. Schools are very much in the business of selling themselves — about 150 colleges nationwide reject more students than they accept, and even those compete hard for the applicants they consider the biggest gets — to which Unigo’s reply seems to be: Look, if you won’t sell the experience to us properly, then don’t even bother. We’ll just sell it to one another.

Empowerment,” “revolution,” “grass-roots movement” — these are phrases Goldman and his employees toss around a fair bit. They’re not wrong, exactly, but there is something dispiriting about seeing that vocabulary applied here, as if the greatest empowerment to which young people can aspire is the empowerment of the focus group — the opportunity to offer marketers “reviews” that help determine how those who come after them will be marketed to. Several Unigo employees repeated to me a sort of party line that ran like this: Who’s a better judge of a college than its students? The potential counterarguments seem less important than the fact that they clearly consider the question a rhetorical one. Thus they feel no need to critique, for instance, their own tabulation that one of the most commonly voiced student complaints about today’s college experience, nationwide, is the lack of sufficient on-campus parking.

It all might seem less suggestive if it weren’t for the fact that this whole “grass-roots movement” seems poised to make a lot of money — most of which seems destined to find its way to the usual suspects, none of whom are part of a grass-roots anything.

Asked whether he ever thinks twice about taking a position in a company with someone as young as Goldman at the helm, Sica — the investor who listened to Goldman while eating his eggs and who now leads Unigo’s board — was surprisingly candid. “I’m still not off the kick of saying we need a real C.E.O.,” he said. “We haven’t needed one to date. We have a very active board. Jordan has listened and has acted appropriately, so I haven’t pushed the point. But it’s not clear to me what kind of person we want as C.E.O. At this point, we’re still a development-stage company: we haven’t sold a thing; we don’t have a dollar of revenue. Once we see where we’re going, I think we’ll revisit that issue, and Jordan may end up as the C.E.O. then, or he may not.”

Goldman has always made the case that his youth is in many ways his chief qualification. “When I brought this up from scratch, some people said, ‘Look, you’re just a kid — are you really the right person to do this?’ And we tried to make the case that we’re the perfect people to do it, because we’re the only ones who know what college today is really like and who know how to reach other students in a way that someone 20 years out isn’t going to.” As for the future: “Right now I’m still the largest shareholder, but I feel like it’s kind of not about those things. If anything, I gave away a fair amount, under the idea that it was more important to get this company off the ground than to be able to say it was mine. Anyway, I don’t have any sort of five-year plan. It’s hopefully about a lot more than just me.” He smiled. “After I graduated, when I told my mom that instead of getting a job I was going to spend a year trying to finance a business plan, she thought I was totally nuts. She still thinks I’m nuts. But at least I’m nuts with a Web site.”

Jonathan Dee is a novelist and a contributing writer for the magazine.

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Would encourage any of my blog readers to share with me any event that you come across. As long as the event/activity/initiative is education/charity/youth oriented and is not-for-profit, I would be more than happy to post it to share!