Kayak.com for Net Price Calculators

I bet on this happening at some point with the introduction of the Net Price Calculator requirement on college websites. College Abacus has launched their Kayak.com-like service for price shopping colleges. I was certainly not the only person to perdict this.

Right now they say they have over 2,000 schools available to search but it is not clear if the colleges agreed to be a part or if the service is simply scraping results from their sites (just like kayak.com has done in the past and run into issues with the airlines, see here and here).

If College Abacus is not asking permission of the colleges, what might the reaction be? Should be interesting to watch, especially that they try to tackle some of the more complex (some have over 50 questions) Net Price Calculators.

College Board National Forum - October 24-26 - Miami, FL

As part of the College Board’s Enrollment Leadership Academy I am headed to Miami, FL in two weeks for the College Board’s National Forum.[1] The sessions and presentations are looking really good and I am looking forward to meeting/speaking with a bunch of people in higher education and K–12 from around the country.

If you will be there and want to meet for coffee or drinks, send me a message on twitter @scottcline or if you are more bleeding edge App.net @scottcline.

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1. Call me strange, but one of my favorite parts of traveling from coast-to-coast for conferences is the five hour flight of uninurrpted time to get work done without phone calls (even though more and more I still have internet access). It is great for getting large sections of writing done. It might have been cheaper and more efficent to book more cross-country flights while writing my dissertation then paying for coffee at a coffee shop.  ↩

"Open Enrollment" at the California Community College →

Lee Gardner for The Chronicle of Higher Education on the latest survey of the California Community Colleges system:

More than 472,000 of the 2.4 million students in the California Community Colleges system were put on waiting lists for classes this fall

While 472,000 students seems like a very large number of students on the waiting list (and it is in real numbers) it is still less then 20% of all community college students.

But what is more concerning:

[California Community College] open-enrollment system served 2.4 million students in 2011-2012, down from 2.89 million students in 2008-9

Over 400,000 students disappeared from the California community colleges during one of the worse economic recessions of the current college-going age when it would be expected that more students would be incentivized to stay in or go to college.

That is rationing, in an open-enrollment system, by any name.

Possible Uses for myNSLDS Button

The Department of Education is launching through the National Student Loan Database System a myNSLDS Button for students this fall. The new funcationity will allow students to access/download their student loan, grant and enrollment information in a flat "machine-readable" file. Pretty cool.

The myNSLDS Button follows on other initiatives including the Blue Button and the Green Button. The Blue Button allowed veterans access to their medical data and the Green Button is being rolled out by organizations like the California Public Utility PG&E to give access for consumers to their energy data.

These represent steps in open access to data for many consumers. While this is still developing there are a number of possible use cases. In no particular order:

• All of the new start ups and some of the older players in student loan management/repayment (see previous post here)
• Quicken's Mint.com and other full service financial monitoring/organziational software (either cloud or desktop based).
• Fraud alerts and credit monitoring.
• School based systems that let student monitor student loans while they are in school (maybe even through school portal websites?).
• Mobile iOS and Android apps for NSLSD.

It should be interesting to watch to see the possiblities unfold for the use of this data.

TICAS Report - Making Loans Work (at community colleges) →

TICAS has been one of the few organizations to consider that student loan borrowing at community colleges can actually help students retain, complete and transfer. They have been making good arguments while at the same time maintaining their stance on college costs and the Project on Student Debt.

Their latest report looks at how some community colleges in California approach responsible borrowing for their students. Well worth the read.