Cue Up the Guidance Counselors

Unigo, a college review site founded by Jordan Goldman has added virtual guidance counselors to its list of services.

Image: YouTube

Like many other entrepreneurs, Jordan Goldman started his own company because he was unhappy about an experience he had and thought it could be done better. His pet peeve: deciding on a college.

While Goldman was trying to determine where to go to college (he ultimately chose Wesleyan University), he noticed that the research involved in figuring it out—which typically consisted of flipping through big, bulky books—was clunky, outdated, and not terribly useful.

So after graduation, he started Unigo, his own website that offered the inside scoop from students who actually attended U.S. colleges; reviews that students could access free of charge. College and university students provided their information for free, and college counselors also provided information for the site to help students navigate the decision process.

But it turns out the users wanted to actually talk to the students and counselors firsthand. So last month Unigo began offering a new service that lets high-school students speak directly to counselors and students via video conference—for a price: $100 per month for a 60-minute session with a counselor and $30 for a 30-minute session with a student. They can also opt for an instant chat if a person they want to chat with is available.

“The idea is that families spend between $3,000 and $5,000 visiting schools,” Goldman said. “What if instead they could, from their living rooms, talk to an engineering major at the top five engineering schools, or if you’re an African American student talk to another African-American student at a college you’re considering to find out what it’s like.”

Even more important, perhaps, is the face time with professional guidance counselors, since public-high-school students, on average, receive just 20 minutes with a guidance counselor every year. College counseling services can cost as much as $40,000 for 12 hours of service.

“I would argue that spending an hour or two with a counselor is worth more than spending hundreds per month on college-test-prep classes,” Goldman says. “A counselor can help you figure out what your essay should say, help you to put your application together so that you can avoid red flags and tell you what to do if you end up on the wait list.”

Without proper counseling, students are less likely to go to college at all, and if they do go, they are less likely to get financial aid and more apt to change their major—another money drain, because it means staying in school longer and paying more tuition.

The site, which now brings in one million unique visitors a month, also rakes in what Goldman describes as “seven figures a year” in revenue, a figure that has gone up 200 percent since the business began. It has made money through advertising and partnership arrangements with media companies, such as providing student reviews for U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings and for USA Today. The company also created a curriculum for high-school students by working with McGraw Hill Education, which provided Unigo with $1.6 million in funding that it has used toward the video-chat expansion.

The student participants will be paid $16 an hour and the counselors $50 per hour for the chat service.

Given that college costs have been outpacing inflation by 4 to 8 percent a year, Goldman sees the counseling services as a growing market. There are 4 million students applying to undergraduate schools per year, but he sees the company expanding to graduate schools, and to parents, bringing his potential audience to perhaps 25 million.

“We think it’s a huge market and no one else is doing what we’re doing,” Goldman says. “We can offer something that is expensive as a mass-market process. It also helps college students too: They can make $16 an hour, and that’s a lot of money.”