Thursday, January 25, 2001

Admissions Sites for States and Systems Grow -- Along With an Internet Company By FLORENCE OLSEN At a time when the fortunes of many academic dot-com's have fallen, an Internet company founded by Allen Firstenberg, a fifty-something retired space-science engineer, is carving a niche in the online-admissions market by creating full-service admissions sites not for individual institutions but for university systems and whole states. Twenty-two states and statewide organizations have signed multiyear contracts with Mr. Firstenberg's company, the Xap Corporation (pronounced "zap"), which creates Web-based information systems aimed at prospective college students. State legislatures and state loan-guarantee agencies pay for the information systems with public money so that their services can be provided free -- and without Web-site advertising -- to prospective students. In 1996, the private company sold its first trademarked "Mentor" system to the California State University System. Since then, it has won contracts to build similar multi-institution systems in Connecticut, Kansas, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin, and 13 other states. The California Assembly recently approved a multimillion-dollar contract for a Mentor Web site, californiacolleges.edu, that will give information to prospective students about all California State and University of California campuses, as well as all community and independent colleges in the state. Judith K. Hingle, an official with the National Association for College Admission Counseling, says that such Web-based information services fill a need at a time when admission to college is becoming more competitive and students are applying to more colleges. Competition is equally intense in the growing online-admissions industry, which includes names like CollegeLink, CollegeNet, and Embark. But Mr. Firstenberg says his company is signing one or two new contracts every month, and is opening new Mentor sites to the public at the same rate. His experience at handling large government contracts may well be a factor in his company's successes. Before founding Xap, Mr. Firstenberg was the director of the Rockwell International Science Center, where he was in charge of information-science research and of development projects for defense-related software. He says he got the idea for Xap after sharing his daughter's frustrations as she applied to a dozen or more colleges. A Mentor site typically comprises thousands of interactive pages of information and electronic forms to help a student plan for college, select a college, apply for admission, financial aid, and scholarships, and plan for a career. Mary Grondahl, the associate vice president for enrollment planning at the College of Saint Rose, says she has already seen New York's Mentor site increase the number of electronic applications that the college receives. "What we're mostly looking for," Ms. Grondahl says, "is the increase in productivity" that she expects to see when her staff members have fewer paper applications to process manually. The procedures for downloading admissions applications from NYMentor are well documented, she adds. "It encourages students to file for both admissions and financial aid electronically, and that's great for all of us," says Keith Jepsen, a former director of financial aid at New York University who is now director of the Global Student Loan Corporation, which provides private loans to distance-education and international students. Colleges that are linked to Mentor systems are provided an electronic data-interchange "wizard" that updates their student-information systems in real time as they receive new applications generated by the systems. Students who use any one of the systemwide or statewide Mentor systems to apply for financial aid can automatically "prepopulate" about one-third of the 104 data fields that must be filled in on the Education Department's Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, form. Last year, the department received 6,863 FAFSA forms that had been generated on the Web from Mentor systems. "The numbers aren't large yet," says Jeanne Saunders, the director of applications processing in the department's Office of Student Financial Assistance. In the 2001-2 academic year, however, she expects a 30-percent increase. Each year, the department receives and processes 10.4 million FAFSA forms, most of them submitted on paper. The CSUMentor system, which is the oldest of the Mentor systems in use today, was developed during an economic downturn in California in the 1990's. Public institutions were eliminating high-school counselor positions because they could not afford them, says Allison G. Jones, an assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs at Cal State and project director for the CSUMentor system. Cal State sought bids for a Web-based system that would make it easy for students to apply on their own for college, he says. Mr. Firstenberg responded to the request for proposal and won the contract, his company's first. After California created CSUMentor, states like North Carolina began buying similar systems, hoping to increase in-state college enrollment. North Carolina's site is NCMentor. "If you're a North Carolina student, and you want to apply to Duke, or Elon, or North Carolina A&T, or U.N.C. Charlotte, this is the place that you'll come," says Robert Kanoy, the director of North Carolina's Pathways Program, which is administered by the University of North Carolina General Administration. NCMentor is a part of that program. The New York State Higher Education Services Corporation, a student-loan guarantee agency, signed a four-year contract with Xap for the NYMentor Web site. Officials of the agency say the site provides a channel for communicating with prospective students beginning in the ninth grade. The agency distributes $630-million in college loans and $2-billion in college scholarships each year. Officials at the agency say they plan to adapt the NYMentor system to the needs of "at risk" children who are in GEAR UP, a federal program that helps disadvantaged middle-school students prepare for college. "It's really the kind of system that guides the student through the steps and takes them right to the [college] door," says Laurence Sombke, the communications director for the New York agency. Ms. Grondahl, at Saint Rose, says the NYMentor site will not be the only one that students and colleges use for college planning and admissions. Saint Rose has a contract with Embark for its online graduate and continuing-education admissions applications. But NYMentor has developed into a comprehensive tool, she says, one that "serves the public as well as the private sector." Last year, prospective students used CSUMentor to submit 158,000 online applications and set up 236,000 college-planner accounts. At California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, 82 percent of undergraduate fall admissions were generated online by CSUMentor. In its first year, NYMentor had nearly 1 million page requests and 4.5 million hits. But the number of hits may not tell the whole story, says Ms. Hingle, a former high-school counselor who is the director of professional development at the admissions-counseling association. Ms. Hingle says online-admissions systems are convenient because students are applying to more colleges as college admissions become more competitive. But she also worries that the students who use electronic-counseling and admissions Web sites may become overwhelmed by the amount of information they find. Students often don't know themselves well enough, she says, to use the systems effectively without the guidance of a family member or school counselor. North Carolina's Mr. Kanoy says schools in his state have integrated NCMentor into the guidance curriculum in the middle schools. "Students begin working with the site as early as the seventh and eighth grades, doing career exploration," he says, and setting up their college planners. When those students are ready to apply for college, applying online at the NCMentor site "will be the norm," he adds. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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