Growing with Technology Awards

College Prowler, Inc.

Customer Relationships
Grand Prize Winner

URL: www.collegeprowler.com
Location: Pittsburgh, PA
Employees: 10 full-time, 2 on contract
Executive Sponsor: Luke Skurman, CEO
Cisco Products: None

Taking the Pulse of Campus Life—In Print and Online.

Choosing a college or university to attend can be an agonizing decision for prospective students and their families. Campus tours and videos don't offer any insights into what life is really like at each institution. Years ago, then-high school senior Luke Skurman found out first-hand how difficult, and costly, this decision can be. "I came from a public high school in San Francisco, and was looking at schools on the East Coast," says Skurman. "I went on tours, I looked at brochures, I went to my guidance counselor, I did everything imaginable, and nothing was giving me that certainty of what I was really going to get myself into. My parents were going to spend $160,000, and it was just a lot of stress."

Ultimately, Skurman chose to attend Carnegie Mellon University, and after graduating, he decided to fill this information gap, and founded College Prowler in 2002. Today, College Prowler is the largest publisher of content covering campus life in the United States. "After buying a house, paying for college is the second-most expensive family decision in the U.S, and there wasn't enough good, honest information out there to tell people what it was really like on campus," says Skurman. "And we wanted to solve that."

A Proven, Student-to-Student, Information-Gathering Process

To date, College Prowler has published 250 books that cover key aspects of each college's "culture" and on-campus life in 20 categories, ranging from academics and housing to the girls and guys. College Prowler's information has a high trustworthiness factor, because its reviews are written by students for students. The data-gathering process is the same for every book. "We send out a job request to each college's English department, journalism department, and newspaper staff, looking for student authors," says Skurman. "These authors survey a random number of students; male/female, freshman/sophomore, junior/senior. They then gather the surveys, and write a two-paragraph editorial review about what they've learned. They sum it up by giving a letter grade in each of the twenty categories. At the end of the process, we send the material to three random students who were not surveyed, to make sure the book is portraying the campus correctly."

Transitioning From Ink to Internet

While College Prowler had been successful in publishing guidebooks, Skurman had always wanted to take the content online, where it could be quickly accessed by a wider audience. However, he was concerned about content piracy, as well as the fact that the e-book format wasn't the most readable or user-friendly. "But everyone kept asking us ‘when are you going to bring this online, when can we get everything instantly and not have to wait?'" says Skurman. "High school students, more than ever, are doing all their research about colleges on the Internet, and they want information now. And overall, it just felt like the future of our business."

In March of 2007, College Prowler digitized all 40,000 pages of its print content and put the material online. It also retooled its Website to provide free content to all users, plus premium content to paid subscribers.

More Information, and More Ways to Use It

College Prowler's new online subscription model offers a wealth of tools that the print books cannot match. On the site, each prospective student can see how the 250 schools surveyed rank in the 20 categories of student satisfaction, and can manipulate this information in an infinite variety of ways. "Once you subscribe, you can read the student quotes, the did-you-knows, the facts and figures, the best and worst on each of the college campuses," says Skurman. The site also promotes the College Prowler books, and users who prefer the more traditional book format can order copies there.

What does Skurman see down the road for College Prowler? "We're still adding to our list of 250 colleges we've reviewed; our goal is to have every college and university in the United States listed on College Prowler. In the future, we want to have even more online content and be even more robust with more real-time information. We'll let our users comment, challenge, and review everything, and have a wiki-esque model, where it starts to have a community on each of the campuses. Now that we've gone online, the opportunity is endless."