A Memphis-area investor has launched a website with the hopes of simplifying the college search process.
Bill Townsend came up with the idea for College Rover during his daughter’s college search in 2020. He grew frustrated with how much time was spent looking for information on schools and putting together spreadsheets — rather than deciding which school was best.
“Why should anybody have to spend their time collecting all this data?” Townsend said. “They need to spend their time evaluating. I started out with the concept of putting together a program of maybe 200 or 300 colleges, but what I quickly realized was that was completely unfair to the larger college universe.”
Townsend’s site launched with metrics on 2,100 U.S. nonprofit and public colleges that have more than 400 students. The data is mostly pulled from the U.S. Department of Education and then simplified to allow for easier browsing and comparison, according to Townsend.
“The problem is that for the typical person, you have to go in and wade through a total of 800 attributes to figure out what's important to you,” Townsend said. “I went through and picked about 100 of their attributes and culled the colleges down to about 2,000.”
College Rover has three free searches per day, allowing students to pick out which data points matter most to them. Data points for comparison contain basics such as type (public or private) and student body demographics to cost and possible ways to pay.
For $3 per month, families can save searches and data points. Townsend said the site is built to allow every member of the family to highlight what matters to them.
“The way the system is set up is sort of like Netflix or Disney+, where two parents and a student can all get added to create their own collections and favorites groups,” Townsend said. “The student might have 10 colleges in their [favorites], the mom might have 20 colleges, with different attributes depending on what's important to each individual.”
There are also entire sections of College Rover dedicated to resources for minority students, LGBTQ+ students, first-generation students, and low-income students.
College Rover also contains dozens of links to more niche information. There are parts of the website where people are able to check the types of major weather events that can hit campus and how close a campus is to a certain brand of grocery store, as well as off-campus entertainment from lakes to skiing.
Townsend said he was hoping to target the millions of students applying to college every year. He has spent $250,000 on getting the website online and will spend $250,000 on advertising for College Rover's launch.
Townsend’s plans for the site depend on the response he gets. Expansion ideas include 50 more data points, adding schools with as few as 100 students, and adding law schools.
