Every student who joins Unigo has a user profile, and while that profile might not feature his or her real name, the idea is that by garnering a few pieces of personal information — your major, your hometown, your race, sex and political leanings — a database is created that makes it possible for newcomers to search the site by all kinds of hyperspecific criteria. You can see how many other people from your own high school are looking at a particular college. You can contact the author of a review with follow-up questions. “You can say, ‘I only want to see reviews of Harvard by African-American students,’ and have a choice of 20,” Goldman projected, “or by English majors, and have a choice of 50. So you can not only see a more comprehensive version of the school than you can anywhere else, but you can also see the school through the eyes of someone who’s just like you.”
The idea of letting students write, or at least contribute to, college guides is not brand new; in fact, the one significant modernization in the guidebook business in the last decade or so is the vogue for books that feature students’ contributions alongside those of objective “experts.” It is a vogue for which Goldman, despite his tender years, can already claim a fair amount of credit. He is the co-editor of “The Students’ Guide to Colleges,” a project he began freshman year in his dorm room at Wesleyan using nothing more than his own ingratiating manner and boundless energy to hire unpaid interns on 100 college campuses nationwide. They helped him to attract their fellow students’ attention to the long-form, essay-based survey Goldman then posted online, offering only the promise that the three best responses to these surveys would be chosen to represent the authors’ schools in print. By the time he graduated, the Penguin edition of “The Students’ Guide” was selling solidly, but the book’s success, as well as its limitations, got Goldman thinking about what might be wrought on a grander scale.
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