by our College Data Analytics TeamThe college matching industry is failing students. Many sites talk about helping students find their “best fit” or their perfect “match”. On their surface, many of these so called matching systems all look the same. They all ultimately result in a list of recommended schools with little explanation as to why those schools are being suggested.
Students are not given a valid enough reason to trust the results, and so most of them don’t, rightly so.
Most technologies vary dramatically in their quality. College matching systems are no different. For the incredible amount of matching technology that exists in other industries, it is surprising to see the simplistic technology that is deemed cutting edge in the higher education space.
One of the best examples of effective matching technology today is Google. Most people don’t think of it in that way, but for every search you do, Google matches you with the content that is the best fit for you in a very personalized way.
Higher education matching technology is similar to the world of search before Google entered the scene: it’s not very good.
In the pre-Google search world, most search engines got away with selling their top recommendation slots to the highest bidder. Even well respected companies like Yahoo bought placements. It was considered the norm for the search technology at the time.
There is no search engine that does this today because no one would use it! Google changed the game by clearly delineating between organic and paid results and in doing raised the quality bar for everyone.
How are many of today’s college matching tools any different from primitive search engines? The worst offenders, the real scam artists out there, simply collect information on a student such as their intended major and then direct the student to the for-profit institution willing to pay the most for that student’s information.
These types of sites should be shut down. Barring the government stepping in and prosecuting, the most effective method is to make cheap lead-gen sites useless by offering a better alternative.
There are many companies out there that genuinely want to help students and are attempting to give them helpful results. The problem is that the matching technology just isn’t very good.
Akin to many first generation search tools, their attempts to match users with their best result is very simplistic. Even the first versions of Google, while better than most of their peers at the time, were incredibly basic.
Google’s flagship product is referred to as “search”, but at some point Google moved way beyond search and got into the “matching” game.
This distinction is important because a large percentage of the “matching” tools out there aren’t matching tools at all, they are search tools.
There are several reasons why the college matching space hasn’t evolved further:
The higher education industry is already massively different than it was thirty, twenty or even ten years ago. The stakes are higher, and the consequences of making a bad decision can be devastating for students.
The next step for anyone reading this is to demand more. Whether you are a student, parent or someone helping to advise them, don’t settle for anything less than the best fit future.
At College Factual, we are working every day to create the next generation of college matching technology. Our mission is to help every student find their future faster by helping them choose the best fit education their money can buy.