Beating the book monopoly
by Naomi Spector
Staff writer
Op-Ed | 10/7/08
Posted online at 5:52 AM EST on 10/7/08
/ Last updated at 3:17 AM EST on 10/7/08
Last year, as a high school senior, I felt as if my life had been taken over by the College Board, by the U.S. News and World Report Best Colleges Guide, by the Fiske guide to colleges, by the Princeton Review. I bought all the big-name books and read all their Web sites because I wasn't convinced I was getting the true story.
In the typical generic and overpriced book, there is about a two-page description of each university with a few cherry-picked quotes by students, which may or may not be representative of the student body's experience of the college as a whole. These insipid descriptions frustrated me. I didn't feel I was getting my money's worth from these ridiculously expensive books. I would sit in my room at night poring over lists of seemingly arbitrary rankings (the Princeton Review, for instance, rates "fire safety" at colleges on a scale of 60 to 99) and wondering if I was wasting my time. Staring at the pages before me, the same question kept popping into my head: I wonder how much money these companies are making ripping off anxious teenagers like me? The thought never failed to anger me.
Jordan Goldman, a 26-year-old who graduated from Wesleyan in 2004, apparently had the same idea as I did. A couple years after graduating he contacted several Wesleyan alumni with his business idea: to start a free Web site with information about colleges for students, written by the students who attend them. Goldman now works on Park Avenue in New York City and has 25 employees, all recently graduated themselves, who are each responsible for 10 colleges, including, of course, the college they attended. Their contacts are students at the college in question who make videos on campus and gather student-written reviews to be published on the Web site. The site, Unigo.com, is considered by those who run it as a sort of grassroots movement dedicated to releasing information that is not controlled by the corporations or the universities, but rather by the students themselves.
In the typical generic and overpriced book, there is about a two-page description of each university with a few cherry-picked quotes by students, which may or may not be representative of the student body's experience of the college as a whole. These insipid descriptions frustrated me. I didn't feel I was getting my money's worth from these ridiculously expensive books. I would sit in my room at night poring over lists of seemingly arbitrary rankings (the Princeton Review, for instance, rates "fire safety" at colleges on a scale of 60 to 99) and wondering if I was wasting my time. Staring at the pages before me, the same question kept popping into my head: I wonder how much money these companies are making ripping off anxious teenagers like me? The thought never failed to anger me.
Jordan Goldman, a 26-year-old who graduated from Wesleyan in 2004, apparently had the same idea as I did. A couple years after graduating he contacted several Wesleyan alumni with his business idea: to start a free Web site with information about colleges for students, written by the students who attend them. Goldman now works on Park Avenue in New York City and has 25 employees, all recently graduated themselves, who are each responsible for 10 colleges, including, of course, the college they attended. Their contacts are students at the college in question who make videos on campus and gather student-written reviews to be published on the Web site. The site, Unigo.com, is considered by those who run it as a sort of grassroots movement dedicated to releasing information that is not controlled by the corporations or the universities, but rather by the students themselves.
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