Colleology

The pandemic has had extremely devastating effects on college admissions for low-income students, specifically BIPOC. There was a heavy decrease in the use of the Common App, used by mainly BIPOC. Many students had to choose between applying for college or putting food on the table. This is furthered by the insufficient scholarships that colleges provide. Colleology, our app, is a one-stop (free) shop for lower-income BIPOC that easily guides students through filling out FAFSA, applying through the UC or Common App, and finding specific scholarships. As we expand globally, we can assist students to apply internationally, and target 3rd world countries which struggle even more with the college admissions process in their country. The long-term effect would be cycles of generational knowledge to assist our future youth, and access to higher education can help lift millions of people out of poverty, setting them on the path of generational wealth.

The pandemic devastated BIPOC/lower-income communities, including their college applications. Use of the Common App has fallen 8%, and use of fee-waivers has fallen 16%. This rises to 18% of Black/Hispanic students. First-generation applicants also decreased by 3%. Community college enrollment fell by 10%, 20% for Black men. 

The reasons behind this are rising costs of college and a difficult application process. College costs increased by 25% globally, while poverty increased to 11.4% since the pandemic. 60% of Black/Hispanic children said the pandemic affected how they'd pay for college. 

Another factor is the inability to understand the application process. Last year, 43% of high-schoolers didn’t apply for FAFSA, one of the most complicated forms relating to college, missing out on billions. This is because of complicated FAFSA language, with over 37% of adults saying they can’t comprehend FAFSA jargon. There’s also the Coalition, Common App, and UC app, all different, a huge pain-point for minorities and first-gen applicants, who may not have a guardian to guide them. 

There are also scholarship access disparities. Minorities receive only 28% of all scholarships. Many minorities/first-gen applicants don’t know how to find scholarships. Scholarship websites are complicated to navigate and long and convoluted.

Our solution is an app easily guiding minorities/first-gen students through the college process. We’ll help students apply for scholarships, financial aid, and college. The app will be a modernized form of current applications to be appealing to students and easier to understand.

We’ll have students fill out information, like race, gender identity, income level, and intended major. This pre-fills out FAFSA and connects scholarships. In FAFSA, we’ll define financial words, such as “MPN”, “ITINS”, “grants”, “subsidized”, etc. We’ll show visual examples of required documents, and where to access them online.

We’ll connect to scholarships, and have a search function finding scholarships related to interests. The same process occurs: define key terms, visual representations of documents, and deadlines can be transported to the calendar.

In college applications, students select colleges they're interested in and get a breakdown of location, demographics, popular majors, intended deadlines (transported to calendar), and necessary documents. They’ll be sent to the necessary App, where we’ll define key terms and give visual representations of necessary documents. We'll also highlight the additional information section, so low-income minorities can discuss struggles they’ve faced.

All this information will be neatly separated, to not overwhelm students.

This will be an iOS app/website.

Our solution serves first-generation students, as well as minorities and low-income students. This includes 40% of Latino children and 46% of black children in poverty. Minorities only receive 28% of all scholarships, and the number of students applying for FAFSA dropped 9.7%. This number was higher for minorities, which we know because the number of people applying for FAFSA who qualified for Pell Grants dropped 3.4%, and 5.4% for families with an income lower than 25,000. Low-income and high minority schools also are 15% less likely to complete FAFSA. Especially with the pandemic, applying to FAFSA with a counselor over zoom made completing the process 3 times longer than normal. Students from low-income, high-poverty, and high-minority schools were 2.3 times as likely to not enroll in college. High poverty students' enrollment in college after graduation dropped 11.4%, 10.7% for low-income, and 9.4% for high minority schools. 

As can be clearly seen, there are huge disparities of minorities applying for scholarships, FAFSA, and college. As a first-generation minority myself, with both of my parents attending college throughout my high school, and being burdened with taking care of both my sick grandparents and younger brother, navigating the college application process, and not having the resources to educate myself held me back severely. Through a non-profit group I created, we regularly communicate with lower-income students to understand the specifics of their circumstances and what they view as most difficult about applying to college. Through communication, we discuss possible solutions and receive critiques and different opinions. For example, we pitched the idea of connecting school counselors, but we received feedback that counselors can often be unreliable and unwilling to work, which would disadvantage undeserving students, and instead allowing students to navigate through the process would be better. There’s also the issue of many minorities being concerned about COVID, and being unwilling to meet in person, and as already stated going through college application documents online increases the completion time by 3 times larger than usual.

That’s why our app is a successful idea. We give minorities and low-income students the resources they need to easily apply for financial aid, scholarships, and college, instead of connecting to counselors which can be unreliable and will increase completion time. We’ll simplify complicated terms, help students manage deadlines (as they likely deal with other stressors, such as taking care of family members or working full time), and help reduce financial burdens as much as possible.

The problem Colleology solves is the lack of applications for FAFSA, scholarships, and college, due to navigating issues. We’ve designed an app to help students receive the most aid and college opportunities. The Challenge focuses on how technology provides opportunities for generational wealth. We can improve the chances of minorities gaining generational wealth by increasing their opportunities to seek higher education. Studies show the financial returns of college set families on a path of generational wealth by boosting income, increasing opportunities for their children, and so on. Parents who haven't attended college increases the likelihood that their child won't attend.

This is an idea we’ve created and have collaborated with other minority/low-income students all around the country to perfect. While we have the visual idea for the app, we haven’t actually begun coding the app as we’re looking for feedback about the feasibility of our service. After receiving feedback and support we’ll begin coding and collaborating to create the app.

Other solutions in the market require students to meet up with a counselor or attend a workshop to receive the necessary knowledge to fill out an application. The negative impacts of this model are already showing, as the application time of FAFSA has increased by 300%. As we shift away from the pandemic, these will likely become mandatory in-person. This is inefficient because many low-income minorities have other obligations such as taking care of family members, supervising household chores, or going to work. The integrity of a counselor is also unknown, as many students have the experience of unwilling and unresponsive school counselors. Counselors treat low-income minority students as academically incapable and move them toward less rigorous academic programs.

As technology revolutionizes, aspects of society shift to be done at home, including shopping, healthcare, and real estate. Our solution is the same. It allows low-income minorities to understand and complete different segments of the college application process on their own, wherever they'd like. This, paired with our system of simplifying difficult terms and visual representations of necessary documents, allow applications to be completed quickly, opposed to attending 1-hour workshops where you must attend the entire hour. This will lead to broader positive impacts in this space, as different organizations both locally and internationally can provide more options to their students to complete the college application process with their own autonomy. The data acquired will give other organizations and governmental agencies insights on how to improve opportunities for low-income minorities.

Since our product is currently in its idea stage, we don't serve anyone with our solution. However, in a year, we hope to serve a large portion of the 5.6 million black children in low-income families, 10.1 million Hispanic children in low-income families, and 300,000 native children in low-income families. In 5 years, we'll expand far beyond just the United States, and just the college application process. We'll target international students, as well as begin helping low-income minorities to apply for jobs, internships, graduate school, and more. This means we'll be targeting both international students who are applying for aid, and connecting BIPOC to jobs in the States, which have a solid commitment to diversity and anti-discrimination/racism policies.

We have a few indicators we'll use to measure progress. Firstly, in our initial stages, we'll let students connect with us on what was still confusing, what was easy to understand, and what compelled them to complete an application. 

We'll also collaborate with FAFSA and various college and merit/income-based scholarships, and through our collection of data, we can see the effectiveness of our app and complete/starting the various applications. Any increase in the amount of low-income minority students looking at, beginning to complete, and even completing an application is seen as progress.

As application seasons end, we'll connect back with students on how many scholarships they won/how many they applied for, the same for college, and how much money they were able to receive out of FAFSA. We'll know we made progress when we see that low-income minorities have gotten more money in merit-based scholarships, as well as different grants. We'll also measure progress through the number of students who applied for and were waitlisted/accepted to a 4-year college.

In the long term, we'll once again connect with students who may be halfway or completing their undergraduate studies, and see how many students were able to go through and complete college and whether their access to college/aid information helped them. Progress is shown when higher numbers of low-income minorities, especially first-gen college students, stay through college and graduate.

I work with one other person who is more focused on the coding/technology side of our idea. We are currently a team of 2 but part of a larger group with more people joining on soon.

Both I and my partner are first-gen Americans and minorities, who came from struggling families and were burdened with family responsibilities. We both know firsthand what it is like to be frustrated with the college application process, the endless websites with confusing information, the complicated financial jargon, and the feeling of hopelessness and worthlessness that comes with it. Experiencing these struggles and also interviewing others helped us come to the realization that we all have the same problems with college applications and the current solutions in place. With this firsthand knowledge, we're better equipped to create, and critique, solutions that can apply to a large group of people. 

I've participated in Diamond Challenge and Blue Ocean competition, both of which gave me access to many resources on how to create an effective service or product which solves pain points. My father, who is taking his MBA, has also given me his books and let me watch his lectures, and this exposed me to a variety of higher-level knowledge regarding business and more specifically, using business for good. I'm also learning about business on my own through the Wharton Global Youth program, where we learn about the economics and marketing side of the business, but also the current state of the economy and its effect, and other skills such as communication, persuasion, data analytics, collaboration, critical thinking, and more.

Our approach to building and diverse, equitable, and inclusive team is to bring on partners who are knowledgable and have similar experiences regarding the difficulty of the college application process. Anecdotal experience is very important to us, as it can help us better explore ideas, and people can use their own difficulties to critique and support solutions. That's why we'll bring on a majority of partners which are minorities, first-gen Americans and college students, and low-income. This will be with an emphasis on those who have attended low-income, high-minority schools, and those who have parents without degrees, and who have taken on extra family responsibilites. All of these will give us a better pool of knowledge and experiences to work with to tailor our solution to all Americans.

I’m applying to Solve because I’ll be able to make my idea a reality with impact-minded peers who can offer me support, guidance, and mentorship. The connections I'll gain being a Solver with experts from different industries will give me access to amazing, well-rounded strategic advice and coaching. I'll also have the opportunity to build an impact measurement practice to best learn the impact I'm making for different communities. I'd also gain a lot of media exposure, which would the first step in my plan of using word-of-mouth marketing to introduce my services to different low-income minorities around the country. 

My main goal for applying for the Solve Challenge is to help various experts give me criticism and strategic advice for all parts of my idea. This includes ways I can improve my business model, financial plan, marketing strategy, impact measurement, and technology. While I believe strongly in the possibility of my idea to do good, I also want to make sure my idea is realistic, and getting mentorship from some of the top business leaders in the nation will help me achieve this. 

We'd like to partner with FAFSA, the Common App, Coalition App, UC App, and other scholarship/extracurricular organizations that'd like to reach more students. We'd like to work with FAFSA to allow us to include our simplified definitions and visual document representations so students can more easily navigate the financial aid process. We'd work with different college admissions applications and also help students understand what universities are asking for, right from the universities themselves. Partnering with individual scholarship organizations can help increase the number of opportunities for students to receive aid by introducing more avenues. All these organizations are fundamental in our solution as we'd like to work with the exact necessary partners to help ease the difficulty around the college application process for our students.