For those interested in college matchmaking sites, there’s one that I found which offers a nice $1,000 scholarship each month exclusively for members. CampusExplorer boasts that it has over 8,000 institutions of higher-education in their database that include 2 and 4-year colleges, for-profit institutions, online schools and career colleges. They note the disparity of student to counselor ratios – one counselor for everyone 250 students – and so want to fill the void by providing a free service to students so they won’t be overwhelmed by the process. That’s basically the gist of what they’re about.
I did a little bit of research on this site and found some interesting info not particularly related to finding colleges, but interesting nonetheless. There’s a person on an aggressive campaign to discredit the site as a reputable business. I’ve found comments from sites like Ripoff Report that deal with the way they handle affiliates (those who are business partners with the site) by not paying up. I also found one that is apparently from a student (CampusExplorer claims it’s bogus) who explains how he was bombarded by calls and offers for student loans with no way of getting his contact info off the CampusExplorer’s database. Don’t let any of this dissuade you from signing up because these posts look fishy. First off, if you look at the dates of each post, you can see that they were all posted at around the same time between April and May of 2011. So most likely these are from the same person who’s obviously disgruntled for some reason. Here are the links to each complaint:
Additionally, if you’re the cautious type, you can always head to DoNotCall.gov and add your phone number to the registry prohibiting telemarketers from calling you. And thanks to the CAN-SPAM Act which requires companies provide an opt-out link or risk penalties, you won’t have to worry about receiving an unending stream of emails from businesses you aren’t interested in. You can also just create an alternate email address from a free service like Yahoo or Google solely for CampusExporler.
Either way, with all the difficulties associated with finding the right colleges, using free services like CampusExplorer can help you find what you’re looking for. Other sites that you can use to help find colleges include CollegeBoard , CollegeProwler and National Center for Education Statistics .
