INNOBLOG

Rarely have I read a newspaper article peppered with as much clearly disruptive language as “The Tell-All Campus Tour,” by Jonathan Dee in the 9/21/08 New York Times Sunday Magazine’s annual College Issue. The story shines a spotlight on Unigo.com, a new college-search website that allows current students to review their school, posting videos and photos as well as extremely, um, candid opinions.

The site is so new, in fact, that last Friday when I clicked over to it midway through reading the article, I got an error page. But once I successfully accessed the site and poked a round a bit, I found a plethora of information — the kind of nitty-gritty details I would have killed for when I went through my own fraught college search.

About my alma mater, one of the 24 lengthy student reviews opened with: “The best thing about __ is that almost every single good thing you will read about in the recruiting materials is true. The one thing I would change is the level of outrageous unresponsiveness the administration often displays. The __ beurocracy [sic] is probably the one major reason why some people decide to transfer.” (I admit, it pained me to see the typo, but I felt a familiar twinge of Red Tape Angst.)

Unigo’s extremely entrepreneurial 26-year-old founder, Jordan Goldman, also co-founded one of the first college review books to include quotes from students, rather than being written exclusively by professional reviewers. But he still saw a huge gap between the needs of high school students and their families as they seek the perfect school, and the standard offerings from companies like Princeton Review and U.S. News and World Report.

“My whole family chipped in for me to go to college,” Goldman said in the Times. “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.”

OK, so we have a clear unsatisfied need. What’s the disruptive angle? Let’s let some denial do the talking. The Times contacted Christopher Gruber, who heads admissions for Davidson College in North Carolina, one of the 268 colleges currently covered by Unigo. His reply when asked if he’d looked at the site (the company sent letters to the admissions offices of all the reviewed schools, granting them early access before Unigo went live): “I’ve got to be honest with you, I’m not spending a ton of time navigating those student-driven sites. 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... The ones that we supply information to are the ones that we spend the most time on.”

If the Unigo model works, it will likely disrupt the typical college guidebook business, giving free, ad-supported content in far greater detail than the average Princeton Review manual can provide. But it will also shake up how college PR and admissions teams have to do their jobs. Challenged by a well-organized, extremely comprehensive resource that gives students a warts-and-all view of the school, official viewbooks and campus tours won’t seem as convincing. (Dee, the writer of the Times story, mentions one video posted about Notre Dame, in which an official tour guide goes around the campus with a friend, giving the official spiel and then letting her friend tell the left-out bits.)

“You can review anything online,” Goldman said in the Times. “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.”

In the year preceding its launch, Unigo developed a network of unpaid interns at the colleges it covers, who in turn got fellow students to write about their schools. 100 of the interns were sent Flip video cameras (another disruptive product!) and filmed typical scenes on campus or interviewed fellow students.

From the Times article:

“[Unigo] 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.”

And one of the young editors for the site, Max Baumgarten, summed it up nicely in the article: “I don’t think [the colleges] know the numbers. 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.”