Exciting news! College Confidential is joining forces with Hobsons, an international company focused on education.
Why Do This? Since 2001, CC has been a self-financed, shoestring operation. We have accomplished a lot with few resources, but we also want to deliver a much better experience for our members. We know that we can offer a far more robust college search function, for example. We have built decent infrastructure - I think we deliver our pages quickly and reliably for the most part. But, it's not perfect - we had a multi-hour outage in late March leading up to notification day. Faced with needing to make more investments in CC than we had the resources for, we evaluated a variety of options. After an extensive evaluation process we decided to become part of Hobsons.
Why Hobsons?. Hobsons brings a lot more to the table than financing. They own the biggest college data database available - we weren't able to afford to license this data before. Now, we'll be able to build out a good College Search section and enhance other site features with this data. More importantly, they have very broad reach among college-bound students, guidance counselors, and college students. They understand CC's market, and they also understand the value that CC brings to its members. We rejected several proposed partnerships with companies that we didn't think shared our values or understood the "CC magic."
What Will Change at CC?. Don't expect big changes anytime soon. Our "College Confidential" brand won't change. Our community won't change. Over time, though, I expect some significant enhancements in site functionality. The things on my list include:
- updating the design and content on CC's information site at
College Admissions, Search, and Financial Aid Help from College Confidential.
- improving the visual design of the forums
- improving and adding new special features like our College Visit Reports and Stats Profiles
- more relevant ads (We rely on Google for most of our ads. Because Google "reads" the page before delivering the ad, they are often OK, but sometimes we get an inordinate number of cheesy distance learning and off-brand med school ads. Hobsons will help us deliver better quality ads.)
What about Roger, Dave, and Sally? I'm joining Hobsons full time, with CC being my sole responsibility. This will give me more time here in the forums, and give me the resources to work more quickly on new site functionality. Dave and Sally will also continue to be part of CC and Hobsons, and we may see more of them in the forums. What was CC's college counseling business will move to a new entity,
College Karma. That will be directed by Dave and Sally and will include all the CC associate counselors. Susan Taub's unique and popular theater and musical theater counseling is part of College Karma, too.
As in any community, it's the members that make it work. Thanks for everyone's participation here - we couldn't do it without our members! (Or our great mod crew!)
In 2001, we started CC with the objective of making it the best free resource for college information on the Web. We've made great progress in that direction with limited resources, and we're going to kick things into high gear as part of Hobsons.
Roger
