Every year something remarkable happens on April 1. The number of posts on CC is reduced by half almost over night:
Why? Well by April 1 virtually every college in the US has communicated their regular admission decisions to students. So that means high school seniors and parents of seniors don’t have much to talk about on CC anymore. The summer lull lasts until next year’s seniors start thinking about college applications in the fall. College Confidential is highly seasonal and the 2022-2023 school year has pretty much wrapped up for us. So I thought it would be a good time to look back.
Demographics
A few years ago we began collecting basic demographic data when people register:
- Date of birth because students must be at least 13 to participate.
- Whether they are a student, a parent or something else.
Some active members (as defined by posting at least once in the past year) predate the collection of this data. I’m going to refer to these members as “legacy”, since many came to CC as students or parents of students and stuck around after their personal interest in college admissions has passed. The community relies on them for their experience and perspective. Legacy members also help maintain civility by flagging posts that fall short of the community guidelines.
In 2022-2023, active members are split nearly evenly between students, parents and legacy members:
| type | % of active membership |
|---|---|
| legacy | 33.4 |
| student | 31.1 |
| parent | 30.5 |
| other | 5.1 |
In terms of posts, ~12% come from students, twice as many from parents and twice as many as that are authored by legacy members:
| type | % of posts |
|---|---|
| legacy | 56.7 |
| parent | 24.6 |
| student | 12.4 |
| other | 8.6 |
Why are students posting less often than parents and legacy members? We observe a large number of students commenting on regular decision threads without engaging with the rest of the site. Having talked to students who didn’t participate much and learning from other communities, students just don’t feel they have much to contribute to CC. They are here (30% of members and over half of visitors are students) more to learn than to contribute.
Stabilizing CC to facilitate learning
Last year @CC_Mike announced four changes related to the formation of College Confidential, LLC:
- Renewed focus on school partnerships
- Removal of overly intrusive advertising
- Return of dedicated community managers (Hi, @CC_Sorin!)
- Reliable technology
We also removed a popup that virtually locked out unregistered visitors. This, by the way, is how I know that ~52% of visitors are students and 37% are parents. This change (and the reduction in advertising) comes at a cost to the business, but we believe it necessary to make CC a valuable resource for students and their parents.
We have accomplished our goals for the year and by one measure at least it’s made a difference. The CC forums had 15% more visitors in March 2023 than March 2022. While there are many factors in play, a big one is that more people found the site when they used Google to search for topics related to college admission. That means the community is providing answers to the questions people are asking. Even something as simple as answering “When will I get a decision?” can make a big difference and the CC community is coming through for millions of people.
Now what?
The landscape of higher education has changed quite a bit over the last two decades, but CC’s focus on helping students hasn’t changed at all. Now that the March rush is over, there’s some time to experiment with some ideas that might help students next school year. We’ve had some luck with AMAs and polls, so we’ll be doing more of those. Other experiments are a bit more speculative such as School Favorite Showdown 2023 and trying out ChatGPT. In both cases the idea is to open spaces for people (especially students) to share what they value about different schools.
We’re also working on improvements to our college search and lists features. It’s not hard to find similar products and many have been refined over years. We think College Confidential can do a better job, however, because we have a deep reservoir of knowledge about schools because of you, the members of the CC community. Almost every day we get feedback about our school pages from people who notice errors in our upstream data sources. In addition, people who are learning about colleges can ask about them on the forums and get answers from a variety of perspectives. At the moment, however, these features feel largely separate from the CC community.
Summary
I believe that 2022-2023 will mark a sort of turning point in CC’s fortune. The last few years have been on the chaotic side and we’re finally able to build a routine that everyone can count on.