The first set of issues, and these habe come up in this thread a couple of times already, are “Is this site on the up and up” “Can I trust them with my data” and the like, so I might as well address that first.
This very thread could well be a guerrilla marketing effort - there is certainly every reason to be a little suspicious of the OP, but I don’t think that necessarily is a reason to set the “scam alert” meter to RED. The rapid arrival of “Tyler” and the positive posts from users with little history here rightly raise some questions, but you can’t fault a company for trying to drum up business. This isn’t a big issue, in my opinion. (Heck, I don’t have any credibility either, as a recent member, with no real history here.)
This is a for-profit venture capitalized company that isn’t doing charitable work, so that does mean you should approach it with a certain degree of wariness, especially with respect to your personal info, just as you would anywhere on the internet. I think it is a slight negative that you have to sign-up with an email before you can really take any kind of test drive on the site (and I think that probably is why their internet stats show a very high bounce rate.) Of course, nothing is stopping you from using a burner email either, so I don’t see this as a huge obstacle to safely checking out the site.
I am not a lawyer, and I haven’t combed through the user agreement on the site with a fine toothed comb, but they are at least saying the right things about the use of user data, so that’s a net positive I think. If you have privacy concerns over your personal financial information, I think that is an issue you have to decide for yourself. The risks are obviously somewhat greater with a private company than they are with the Net Price Calculator on the web site of a reputable college. You can skip the financial stuff, and the sorts of data you need to disclose to use the search features seem reasonable and not excessively intrusive.
The bigger issue for me at least is that the current strategy for monetizing the site (at least as far as I can determine from the limited articles I was able to find about the company) is to somehow extract money from the colleges themselves - the exact mechanism for how this is supposed to work is unclear. This certainly is a potential red flag, because there are obviously all sorts of way they could potential juke the search results or whatever in exchange for payments from schools. I am absolutely not saying that they are presently doing this or that this is their future strategy, but I think it is a question worth asking. I think I personally would like to see more transparency on exactly what their business plan is, and some more concrete commitments to neutrality and honesty. Obviously, for the company, this gets into all sorts of considerations about their competitive advantage and intellectual property, and I think this is probably an area that the company will need to find a delicate balance between consumers and their revenue sources.
On the positive side, my email hasn’t filled up with spam since signing up for the site, and compared to many other similar sites on the internet, their search results are somewhat refreshingly clear of for-profit scam colleges. That’s not much, but it is something.
Overall I think in terms of Privacy / User Protection / General Integrity, I would give them a (very tentative) grade of C.
Tyler would probably consider this a tough grade, and some on here will probably consider that a hopelessly naive grade, but I see no reason to not at least take a look, and use your own personal judgement as to how much you want to trust them with your private data.
