Winter Park grads launch site to get to college

College admissions – for many students it’s a daily thought. It’s talked about with friends in class, discussed with parents over dinner, picking schools, writing essays. And it’s stressful.

“It keeps hitting you again,” said Shanay Thakkar, a Winter Park High School International Baccalaureate Program senior. “These are the decisions that can alter the rest of your life.”

Statistics show that there are more and more high school graduates and students applying to college. According to the most recent study from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, between 2010 and 2011 the percentage of students applying to at least three colleges rose from 77 percent to 79 percent, up from 67 percent in 2000.

On top of the pressures involved in college admissions, there are all the questions of how to fill out the application and to do so successfully. Two young entrepreneurs say they have the answer in their online-based business College Creed, which they launched last October. College Creed was started as a way to help mostly already well-prepared high school students polish their college admissions essays through one-on-one, sentence-by-sentence guidance from co-founders and 2011 Winter Park High School valedictorians Will Yang and Andrew Kolarich.

“Peer-to-peer learning is incredibly effective,” Yang said. “We’ve been there and we have something to share with you.”

The 20-year-olds found their own success during the college admissions process – Yang attends Northwestern University and received multiple scholarships, and Kolarich is at the University of Florida, recently admitted to the school’s medical program. But it wasn’t without many of their own moments of fretful confusion. They wanted to take what they learned and pass that on to other confused high school students.

They saw success through essay guidance and mentoring, with their students getting into top colleges, such as Duke, Columbia and Northwestern.

But they felt a need to reach farther, and decided to do that through helping students with filling out the common college application. This summer they released a web video course, which currently has 43 lectures teaching students “how to master their story” during the essay and short answer portions of the application. More than 900 people have listened as an approachable Yang gives advice and uses examples from his own personal college journey, and it’s the most popular one online dedicated to the subject. It’s also the most reliable and easiest to navigate, said Teddy Jungreis, a Winter Park High School International Baccalaureate Program senior and campus ambassador for College Creed. It takes away some of the stress involved.

To learn more about College Creed, visit collegecreed.com. School administrators who want to bring College Creed to their students can find more information at schools.collegecreed.com or [email protected]. Right now, their online course costs $39.

“Now with College Creed, all the information is in one place, from students who have gone through it,” he said.

College Creed is trying to reach out to as many students as possible, especially those who can’t afford to hire private college consultants to help with the process – which can cost upwards of $400 an hour. They also target students who don’t get enough time with their school counselors to answer all their admissions questions. Yang said high school students spend an average of only 38 minutes talking with their counselors about admissions, which isn’t nearly enough time. They currently charge just $39 for their course, which can be accessed anywhere, as many times as a student needs it.

“We saw our peers not getting the attention they deserved,” Yang said.

“College admissions are by far the most competitive that they’ve ever been,” Kolarich said. “We’re trying to equalize the college playing field for students who don’t have the resources to get to the next level.”

To expand their reach, they’ve begun partnering with high schools, offering their course at a discounted rate for all the school’s seniors to have access to the web videos. Yang and Kolarich want to also target underserved schools, where most students don’t even have the opportunity to consider college as an option.

“They have a hard time setting up that college culture, even with the highest achieving students,” Kolarich said.

Their course price makes a successful college application process a possibility.

“We’ve always kept this mission in mind, to level the playing field,” Yang said. “It’s incredibly rewarding to help students achieve what they never thought was possible.”

In the future, the team hopes to keep adapting to their students’ needs – every time a question is asked frequently they add another lecture to cover the subject – and expanding their scope through school partnerships. Both busy college students, Yang an economics major and Kolarich a future doctor, they aim to continually work on their business by possibly adding more young college students as mentors. Because what makes them unique, Yang said, is the peer aspect of their business.

Whatever they do, Yang and Kolarich want their students to submit a “no regrets” application, and to learn a little about life from the admissions process, and not just about submitting a form by its deadline.

“It’s more about the journey,” Yang said.