Three Precedents
Overview
The market for college access resources is a convoluted mix of quality and uselessness, of altruism and scams. Sifting through these, I found three college search tools that stand above the rest.
College Foundation of North Carolina
The College Foundation of North Carolina (CFNC) supports high school students in North Carolina throughout their entire college application and acceptance process. Starting with a college search, students can get instructions on what's needed to apply to college and financial aid, and even develop a more detailed family financial profile. However, they only offer their services via a website, and they are exclusive to the state of North Carolina. Additionally, their college search does not develop a personalized list.
EasyAccess will will be available in app form, eventually to a wider audience base, via a mobile application. What's more, the design of EasyAccess will be intuitive and high school student friendly.
College Board's BigFuture
BigFuture is College Board's (the organization the runs all things SAT) college search program. Distinguishing themselves among other college searches, BigFuture allows its users to create profiles to track and save schools that meet their criteria.
Again, however, though BigFuture offers the customization of a personal profile, they lack the ability to connect with high school counselors for monitoring and prompting students. EasyAccess will have a backend platform that counselors will be able to use to track students. This resource will be invaluable to increase college goers at high schools.
College Greenlight
College Greenlight is most similar to EasyAccess in their target user: traditionally underrepresented college applicants. College Greenlight's college search focuses on criteria that is specific to those students (diversity of universities, financial awards, etc). Including those criteria for most students looking for a perfect fit at school is invaluable.
While College Greenlight is an amazing organization with a meaningful purpose, they are lacking a strong mobile presence (though they do have a mobile site). They do have a backend counselor platform, but EasyAccess's counselor platform will allow counselor's to send push messages (texts, Instagram posts, and Tweets) through the app. Both the ability to message students from the platform to other apps and the existence of a mobile app for both students and counselors distinguishes EasyAccess from College Greenlight.
