Campus Explorer Site Review

Campus ExplorerCampus Explorer

Campus Explorer

http://www.campusexplorer.com/

The campusexplorer.com site is owned and operated by Campus Explorer, Inc., a Santa Monica, CA, based company started in 2007 by CEO, Jerry Slavonia. As the site’s name reflects, you’ll find a lot of information here related to finding a college, applying, and getting accepted. There are also articles on college entrance test prep, college planning for high school students (with check lists for each year of high school), and campus life. There is also a scholarship search feature.

To search for scholarships, you can choose any one of the category search links listed by major, school, or state. The side-bar scholarship search feature on the Scholarship page allows you to search by major, schools, state, application deadline, minimum award amount, background, affiliations, interests, and gender.

For our search, we entered our major and our state and got 382 results. The list of results indicated that the top three were 100% matchestwo from the University of Kansas (our state of choice was Texas) and one of Campus Explorer’s “exclusive” $1,000 scholarships. We’re not entirely sure how these got a 100% matching rating. The rest of our list came in at a 50% match. Since we only entered two search parameters, the results we got presumably matched only one of those. Clicking on a list item will take you to the individual page for that scholarship, which will give you the scholarship’s sponsor, application deadline, application difficulty, competition, scholarship eligibility requirements, and contact information. No links to the sponsoring organization are given, so you will have to look up the site and online application information on your own. What links are given refer back to web pages on Campus Explorer’s site.

In our scholarship search, we found that the preponderance of the scholarships listed were sponsored by individual schools. If you already know what school you’re going to attend, you can cut to the chase and look up scholarships by school (or contact your school’s Financial Aid Office directly). Many of those scholarships we hadn’t seen on the other scholarship search sites we’ve visited, but how well the search feature helps to narrow down your results is questionable.

To save any search results, you’ll have to register with the site by providing your name, education level, graduation year, school, intended major, zip code, email address, and password. You can also save college searches and helpful articles from the site to your Planner. The Planner sidebar is a table of contents of your saved items and also includes a section of College Planning check lists (a very nice feature).

While looking around on the Web for information about Campus Explorer, Inc., we came across a few sites where complaints against the company had been lodged. One complainant alleged that Campus Explorer had not paid them the $35K owed for traffic directed to their site. Another complaint from a post-secondary educational institution stated that the information about their school was completely wrong and Campus Explorer refused to correct the misinformation.

The Campus Explorer site has some good stuff, particularly under the college planning section. The scholarships returned in our search, although not well targeted and sponsored primarily by individual colleges and universities, were meaty scholarships, not the disappointing herd of essay contents to be found on other sites. Although the Campus Explorer, Inc. may not sound like the most forthright organization given the complaints noted above (and we do take that into account in our rating), we think the scholarship results are worth wading through.

We rated Campus Explorer 3 1/2 out of 5:

3 1/2 Mortar Board Rating

 

 

Related Links:

Crunchbase Review

Interview with Jerry Slavonia of Campus Explorer