Who’s Got the Best Advice on Applying to College?

College Confidant, a new social enterprise started by five Harvard students, thinks the answer is simple: college students.

The service is the project of Nitesh Banta, Amy Skaria , Tej Toor, Kai Wu and Amit Patel. The team recently won the Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum Elevator Pitch Competition. Way to go guys! I hear Tej did a bang up  job giving the pitch, but everyone helped her prep and gave valuable feedback in preparation.

It’s worth noting that I’ve blogged about another of  Nitesh’s projects, Summer Workation, before. Since then, Nitesh has been in high gear with Summer Workation, attended Singularity University’s summer program which is pretty interesting on its own, and now with College Confidant he hopes to “increase accountability for high quality college counseling”.

College Confidant matches curious college applicants up with current college student advisors who share their interests. The idea is that since current students are familiar with the applications process having recently been admitted themselves. College Confidants can share a unique perspective on a range of issues that applicants have questions about. With the professional college admissions advising often costing upwards of $200 an hour, the prospect of advice from a student at your dream school for $12-$20 is appealing.

CC is hoping to connect you with the right Chinese speaking, oboe playing, Premed, Soccer star at Stanford to advise you. You’ll get the inside campus scoop on your favorite clubs, sports, and activities and get to reflect on how best to frame your involvement in your application.

It’s an interesting idea and in this market the team will likely have a strong first mover advantage. They already have Confidants trained to advise on admissions questions at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford with more schools on the way. Once word gets around campus and students sign up to be Confidants on lots of campuses it will be awful hard for a competing service to gain as much traction. And with a spiffy new website and a growing presence on Facebook and Twitter, word is definitely spreading.

What was your college admissions process like? Would you have found College Confidant’s service helpful?