Seven years ago, in his final semester at Brown University, Craig Powell came up with a business concept he thought could revolutionize college applications.
Having grown up in rural Missouri, then found his way to Brown by way of a private school in New Jersey and West Point, he had noticed “jaw-dropping” disparities in the resources available to college-bound students, the options they saw, and the paths their lives took. Technology, he decided, could help even the playing field. A year later, on April 24, 2002, he launched ConnectEdu Inc. in Providence, which focuses on connecting students and colleges well before senior year. Students can get an account through their high school and look for colleges that match their interests. If a student decides to apply, it’s completely paperless and the high school can send them everything through the system.
Now based in Boston, ConnectEdu has grown to employ more than 75 professionals and serve more than 500,000 college-bound students and advisers, more than 1,000 high schools, and hundreds of colleges and employers, including the University of Massachusetts and the University of Connecticut, with more joining every month.
PBN: You consider the traditional college application process a big part of the problem that ConnectEdu was created to address. Why?
POWELL: It’s a process that is completely unorganized, that has no central mechanism for bringing everyone together, that as far as I can tell works for everybody except the student. … It’s just absolute lunacy about a life stage that is arguably the most important one you take.
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PBN: So what did you set out to do?
POWELL: The logic was that if we could, first and foremost, empower the student … create an environment that provided the tools they needed, in a format that was customized for them, and create collective bargaining power by aggregating them all into a single community … and look downstream to provide efficiencies to … primarily colleges and employers.
PBN: Did you make it a priority to reach underserved populations?
POWELL: That’s always been our core marketplace … middle- to lower-income high school environments.
PBN: How do you make that into a viable business?
POWELL: Middle- and lower-income students are the largest student population, they’re the most interesting student population, and they’re the most inefficient for the colleges to connect with today. But the colleges are enormously dependent on them. So by deploying a solution that helps those students, we’re then able to identify the inefficiencies and difficulties that our college and employer partners have trying to connect with those students, and provide them with a [more] efficient mechanism to drive interaction.
PBN: For students it’s free, and colleges and employers pay?
POWELL: It’s free to the high school, the counselor, the teachers and the students and parents. Then we charge the downstream partners, colleges as an example, based on the efficiencies that we provide to them … in interacting with students; in our ability to securely move records from the high school’s system to the college, which saves them on average $14 per student transcript; or in helping them understand what their enrollment pipeline is looking like … and helping them be more effective in their enrollment behaviors.
PBN: How long a relationship do you set out to build with each student?
POWELL: Ideally, we’d like to work with students from age 13 to 35. Our youngest students right now are 13, and our oldest are 23, 24 years old. So we’re actively growing toward the 35-year-old mark, but our sweet spot has been 15- to 18-year-olds.
PBN: There’s a lot of competition in this market. How do you stand out?
POWELL: We do not believe there’s anything comparable in the marketplace in terms of a comprehensive, integrated solution. … The list of companies that do something that we do is probably 400 long, but herein lies the problem for the student: The process is fragmented, and as a result, I never reach any scale in terms of my consumer voice, nor do I have a single place to manage this life stage. … [For colleges], we’re really talking about a fundamental shift in how people handle this transition. … This process, still using manila folders, is … probably 20 to 30 years behind any other industry.
PBN: Why did you move ConnectEdu to Boston?
POWELL: We left Providence painfully. We still have employees who live in Providence, some of our biggest investors live in Rhode Island, board members. … I actively pitched this idea as something that seemed well-aligned with [the “innovation-at-scale” concept] where as a small state, you could test models that you could then scale to other locations. But it all fell on deaf ears, juxtaposed against our needs as a small company. … And as we were hiring, more and more of the applicants lived in the greater Boston marketplace. … I would still love to find a way to make something work in Rhode Island. … I can assure you, for us to put a fulfillment center [for example] in the Boston marketplace doesn’t make any sense. But it has been absolutely perplexing to me to hear the stated goals [of economic development officials] relative to what our experience was in trying to tap into those resources. •
