Digital Delco: Aston firm lists grad schools in cyberspace
Reprinted from the Delawre County Daily Times January 15, 1997
By MITCH GITMAN
Times Correspondent
For college students looking to go to grad school, there's a new place to look for one. Its easy-to-remember name is also where it can be found: gradschools.com.
The ".com" ("dot-com") of course means it can be
found on the Internet. Gradschools.com is a free resource on the Internet's
World Wide Web that was officially launched Jan. 1 by Liberty City College
Promotions of Aston.
Gradschools.com is the second World Wide Web venture for this company
that was founded in 1989 to do marketing geared specifically toward college
students.
Studyabroad.com was introduced September 1995 as a directory of programs
for the traditional junior year of international study.
Gradschools.com similarly is a directory of graduate school programs:
in 130 study areas, offered at colleges and universities around the world.
Select entomology from an on-screen menu, click a button, and before
your eyes will scroll a page citing 28 entomology programs.
For the University of Arizona, there is a mailing address, two sentences
of description and a note on degrees offered. For the University of Kansas,
there is in addition phone and fax numbers, a list of research areas and
an active link to an e-mail address.
Besides the U.S. programs, there is a minimal listing with e-mail address
for the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
Liberty City staff have been compiling basic contact information for
gradschools.com by scouring the educational institutions' own Web sites,
then e-mailing the institutions to obtain more extensive data, company president
Mark Shay explained. Schools and programs not on the Web are contacted by
phone and fax.
The difference in the amount of information for each listing comes down
to the difference in what the administrators will or won't submit.
Gradschools.com now has at least the basics on about 2,000 institutions
and 12,000 programs, according to Shay.
"We're about a quarter of the way of getting the database up to
speed," he said, looking at reaching 50,000 programs by July.
All the listings are free to the schools, and use of the site is free.
Gradschools.com will make money, Shay said, by charging to include on the
listings clickable "hyperlinks" to the programs' Web sites. Schools
would pay an annual fee.
"We didn't want to just run out and put Budweiser ads on our site,"
Shay related. "We wanted to keep it within the academic realm. So we
wanted to really limit the amount of big banner advertising or unrelated
advertising."
Yet Studyabroad.com does have 12 master sponsors whose linked icons appear
on the home page.
Most are for individual institutions' international programs.
One is for the College Consortium for International Studies (CCIS), which
brings together about 150 American colleges and universities to cooperate
on 35 programs in 24 countries.
Paul Parsons, associate director of CCIS, said he is not aware of any
other "broad-based" third-party Web sites serving as resources
for international study.
And concerning its free listings, Parsons said studyabroad.com is "becoming
comprehensive."
Studyabroad.com has 6,000-7,000 programs from 700-1,000 academic institutions
worldwide online; 130 institutions are advertising on the site.
Shay allowed that now gradschools.com's greatest competition comes from
the well-established text guides to colleges and universities published
by the likes of Petersen's and Educational Testing Service.
He said a Web site, better than a book, can offer:
"Time sensitivity. I mean, area codes change almost daily nowadays.
E-mail addresses are constantly under flux. And the ability to link."
Any updates would have to be e-mailed by administrators, and Liberty
City plans to remind them with quarterly mass e-mails, semi-annual postal
mailings and occasional calls.
Gradschools.com has no advertisers yet. Liberty City has just put out
the rate sheets.
"The main thing to get it going was to get a good start on the free
listings, to get the directories established and then get the announcements
made to start marketing the site," Shay said. "And then when it's
trafficked we'll have something to sell.... We wanted to prove our worth."
Already though, Internet services accounted for a quarter of Liberty
City's close to $500,000 in revenues in 1996, Shay said. He projects that
the two Web sites will reach half of revenues in 1997. Gradschools.com
can be found on the World Wide Web at www.gradschools.com. Studyabroad.com
can be found at www.studyabroad.com.
Mitch Gitman can be e-mailed at mgitman@usa.net.