Jordan Goldman, Founder, Unigo

Jordan Goldman will be speaking at the 11th Annual Education Industry Investment Forum in Phoenix, Arizona on March 11.

His company, Unigo, the free site for student-created school reviews, is also written about at The Wall Street Journal.

Goldman will sit in conversation with John Katzman, founder of Princeton Review anjavascript:void(0)d new venture 2Tor, to discuss the future of social networking as a marketing tool and its impact on the publishing industry. You can read more about the event at at our homepage. Make sure to check out the list of over 80 speakers!

But back to Goldman, who I hope to catch for five minutes at the conference to video interview...

Walt Mossberg writes:

I've been testing Unigo, and I like it. In the sampling of college profiles I read, the site seems to have struck a good balance between the immediacy and candor of student submissions, and the professionalism needed to weed out wildly biased or inaccurate claims.

The site, founded by a 26-year-old who formerly created printed college guides, says it employs 19 full-time editors. This team uses information from a nationwide network of 300 representatives on campuses to create each college's profile. Each representative rounds up contributions from others on campus, so that the site claims that over 15,000 students contributed to the profiles of the first 250 colleges.

I was a little unimpressed with the review. It didn't tell me anything new about the site, which I've already visited several times, even signing up during the beta testing.

The rest of Mossberg's article is just a "the good and the bad" piece and what he thinks about the site's potential. And even there, I'm left wondering. To me this seems like one of the more significant developments in online publishing, marrying a peer review model with a YouTube-like social networking function. The impact this would have internally at colleges and universities should be significant. I know that my alma mater,Wake Forest University didn't k now about it, and they had tried to launch their own version of this idea.

Does anyone in our audience use this site or have they checked it out? I'd like to know a bit more about your experience with Unigo, so please feel free to leave comments.

Entrepreneurs, Create the Future of Education

If you are like most entrepreneurs, you value conversations, ideas, and you understand and appreciate the value of risk.

I'm not talking petal to the metal risk. I'm talking about risk that refines your business and takes your ideas into a direction that few people travel.

Are you an education innovator who is out to disrupt traditional education services? Are you online savvy? Do you want to answer the call to action that students are giving you by offering them and their schools a service that addresses real need in the market?

Do you think you have a school idea that would work well in the for-profit K12 and Post Secondary industry?

Sign up to participate in the 11th Annual Education Industry Investment Forum and apply to be on of the Five Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2009.

Are you a John Katzman, founder of 2Tor?

Does your business plan's vision of the future resemble the innovative energy and forward thinking of a Jordan Goldman, founder of Unigo.com?

Do you look at publishing like Jeff Shelstad at Flat World Knowledge?

If so, and even if you are wildly different than these individuals, you have an opportunity to join them at the 2nd Annual FuturED Symposium, a showcase and platform for the latest developments in the education industry.

We look forward to seeing you in Phoenix in March.

Putting New Thinking on the Stand

One of the great things about the upcoming Education Industry Investment Forum is that it provides a platform for innovators and iconoclasts to debate the future of education.

On March 11, 2009, founder of Princeton Review John Katzman and Unigo.com founder Jordan Goldman will discuss the role of online innovation in the future of for-profit education.

Why? In short, because they are two people who know intimately what it means to be entrepreneurial. And they are engaging speakers.

What makes John Katzman fun to listen to is his tendency to call things absurd that he thinks are absurd, like his belief that the SAT is not an accurate measure of a student's abilities. He said this in a recent PBS interview.

We need objective measures. If all colleges had were grades, then every teacher, every high school teacher in the country, would have complete control over your future. At the same time, the idea that one test is a perfect measure for several million kids going to several thousand colleges is absurd. You need a flexible system where you can be tested in the things that you are passionate about.

Katzman has now teamed with the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California to run an online community that accentuates current degree programs in Education. It's entrepreneurial, gutsy and an assertive game-changer in the education space.

And Jordan Goldman? He was an early instigator of industry-changing business ideas.

At 18, Goldman created Student Guides, a print publication that gave insight on the college selection process.

He's now done one step better than that and decided to go online, for free, and let students make their own pitches for their own campuses.

He's young, and he's very bright. He sees a future in the social networking and web 2.0 model for college admissions and selection.

He was able to create a model that transforms the possible student population of a school, because it allows more information about that school to be given in a way that makes sense to the potential student. In other words, Unigo.com let's students market their own school to people most likely to attend it.

...in the case of Unigo, it means prospective students who previously couldn’t afford to go on campus tours all across the country, who weren’t able to grab a current student by the arm and ask them questions – now they have a way to find an amazing range of authentic information right from their living rooms. Prospective students have a way to interact with one another and ask each other questions about these schools. And they have the ability to see each college from the perspective of someone just like them. Sure, Columbia is a great school. But is it a great school for African American students? What about students from California? Is it the same experience for a wealthy student as it is for someone a bit less well-off? How about a conservative student, or a gay student? Those are questions Unigo can instantly help you find the answer to. We want to move the focus away from overly broad rankings that don’t tell you much of anything, and over to “What’s the college that’s actually best for YOU?”

You can join them March 9-11, 2009 at the Education Industry Investment Forum.

Register now to benefit from early bird discounts. Early registration

EIIF Announces New Speakers for 2009

The following speakers are coming to EIIF in Phoenix March 9-11, 2009:

Mark Kantrowitz, Founder, Finaid.org
George Bernstein, CEO, Nobel Learning Communities
Howard Block, Managing Director, Knowledge Investment Partners
Brooke B. Coburn, Managing Director and Co-head of Carlyle Venture Partners III
Mark DeFusco, Managing Director, Berkery Noyes
Peter Leyton, Partner, Ritzert & Leyton
Ted Mitchell, Managing Director, New Schools Venture Fund
Charles Thornburgh, President, Kaplan Virtual Education
Matt Leavy, CEO, eCollege
Daniel Pianko, Principal, Noah Fund
Rita Ferrandino, Managing Director, ARC Capital Development
John Katzman, CEO, 2Tor and Founder of Princeton Review
Jordan Goldman, Founder, Unigo.com

and there are over 45 other names.

Stay tuned to the blog for the agenda, and please consider your company for a presentation at the 2nd Annual FuturEd Symposium where you could be one of five innovative companies presenting to investors.

You can also visit our homepage for the latest in registration news, and administrative information.

A white papers site is coming soon. That will be a one-stop resource for all of the information you need to stay ahead in the education industry.

Five Questions with John Katzman

John Katzman, CEO, 2Tor

New Speaker for Education Industry Investment Forum

EIIF is proud to announce that
John Katzman, the iconic founder of Princeton Review and the entrepreneurial energy behind the new 2Tor.com, will be speaking at the forum in March.

We ask him five questions about the industry:

EIIF: What act of strategic investment in the education industry by any player in the past five years do you admire the most, and what was its outcome?

John Katzman: Denver Public Schools investment in teacher comp reform. So far, so good—most teachers like it, and performance is up; I think this will prove a useful way-station.

EIIF: What industry genre will have the most influence in the future of education over the next five years?

JK: For-profit and hybrid colleges.

EIIF: If you could name any industry within education that requires the most change, what industry is it and what changes do you think it needs?

JK: Student finance. More transparency and simplicity.

EIIF: What inspirational idea outside of education has had a dominant effect on how you do business?

JK: Apple, which proves that product matters.

EIIF: For an education company or for profit school that is looking to grow, what is the one thing they need to be prepared to do before meeting investors or before launching their product or service into the marketplace?

JK: Explain how they will achieve both financial and educational excellence.

Princeton Review Founder to Challenge U of Phoenix

John Katzman, who founded Princeton Review and took on the standardized testing industry, will now take on the market that companies like University of Phoenix and Capella and Walden Universities, by launching an online Master's degree program with the USC Rossier School of Education, with his new company, 2Tor.

The story is:

2Tor is starting in a field with which Katzman is familiar, and where the need is great: teacher education. On Monday, 2Tor will announce that it is teaming up with the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education to create an online version of its master’s of arts in teaching, called MAT@USC. Within a decade, in Katzman’s grand vision, the online version of USC’s program — which now produces about 150 students a year — could produce 5,000 or more, helping not just California but many states meet the desperate demand for teachers in high-need (urban, rural, low-income) schools.

But it is not just about volume, say Katzman and Karen Symms Gallagher, the Rossier school’s dean. There are no shortage of teacher education schools, nor even of teacher prep programs offered online. But at a time when higher education institutions are facing significant pressure to increase the number of students they educate, and to be more innovative in how they do so, most of that growth and much of that innovation has been relegated, Katzman notes, to large for-profit providers (notably the mammoth University of Phoenix Online), niche for-profit institutions (Capella and Walden Universities) and ambitious but less prestigious nonprofit institutions, like Nova Southeastern University and the University of Maryland University College.

Katzman faces a challenge to build exclusivity and brand value in an education field where there have been few -- though remarkable -- successes.

What do you think of the technique, which appears to be linking with an esteemed partner to further both companies brands? Who will win in this deal? Is it the win-win that it appears, or more of a win, short-term for 2Tor?