The Chronicle of Higher Education

Monday, March 26, 2007

Web Site Is Designed to Match Admissions Officers and Applicants

Three young entrepreneurs have unveiled a new Web site that they say will help college admissions officers more effectively recruit students.

The Web site, called Zinch, allows high-school students to post online profiles revealing their talents, hobbies, and passions -- qualities that do not show up on transcripts and reports of standardized-test scores -- before they start the college-application process. In turn, colleges could use a search function to find and recruit students with specific interests, like tuba playing or poetry writing, the Web site's founders say.

"This would personalize recruiting a lot more, and it ultimately creates better matches," said Mick Hagen, a 22-year-old student at Princeton University who has taken a leave of absence to become the company's president.

The Web site does not charge students money for joining, but admissions officials would have to pay for access to students' personal-contact information. As of late last week, 451 students had created profiles on the site. The company hopes to have 20,000 students registered by the end of May.

After their first glance at the Web site, some admissions deans said Zinch had at least the potential to complement their traditional recruiting efforts, depending on the quality of the profiles and the number of students the site could attract. Matthew X. Fissinger, director of admissions at Loyola Marymount University, said he could not envision that Zinch would diminish colleges' dependence on existing outlets of student data, like the College Board's Student Search Service.

"But looking for ways to supplement that list brokering with the opportunity to zero in on particular types of students is something we often talk about," Mr. Fissinger said.

He wondered, though, about how much insight deans could gather from profiles students had created to impress colleges: "Can we trust the information that's there?"

Mr. Hagen said the site was not designed to replace traditional applications, which have many objective measures of students' potential, but to help students, particularly those with less-than-perfect SAT scores, catch the eye of college recruiters in the first place.

He believes that his Web site can help alleviate applicants' anxiety about the admissions process. "We're social entrepreneurs," he said. "We're not just in it for the money."

Along with Mr. Hagen, the site's co-founders are his brother, Brad Hagen, and Sid Krommenhoek. According to the Web site, Brad Hagen is an undergraduate at Brigham Young University and Mr. Krommenhoek is a graduate of Brigham Young.