Hobsons College Matching Technology Reinvents Online College Search

CINCINNATI, May 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Hobsons, a leading provider of education products and services, is excited to announce the beta release of its innovative college matching  feature, designed to help students find the school most suited to their tastes. This patent-pending tool is the first and only college search available that uses "fuzzy matching" technology to understand what students want most out of their college choice and connect them with the schools that most closely resemble these priorities.

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The new college search tool will initially be hosted on College Confidential, the leading Web community for college-bound students, and  will soon be released on Hobsons' other flagship sites at CollegeView.com, GradView.com, and USAEducationGuides.com.  

The tool lets students find schools based on criteria that are most important to them—including location, school size, academic majors, great college towns, tuition and fees, campus setting, and many other items. Students rank these items based on how important they find each category. Finally, this produces an immediate list of ranked schools that are broader than traditional college searches, which simply display only the schools that meet rigid perimeters.

College search results are displayed based upon the percentage they match the student-determined qualifications. This gives students the opportunity to see institutions that best match their interests, including some that meet most of their preferences very well, but may not match on one or two criteria. This exposes students to great institutions that closely meet their interests that they may not have considered otherwise.

"Our new college search tool represents first-to-market technology that delivers the most comprehensive and immediate results to narrow down a student's college search," said Roger Dooley, vice president of digital marketing, Hobsons. "We're excited that students can now simply click, rank, and match their college criteria to create an immediate list of schools that are a good match. Our fuzzy matching approach will, we expect, create some interesting, 'outside-the-box' suggestions and highlight schools that students might not have otherwise considered."

Fifteen-thousand current College Confidential users were invited to participate in a closed beta test last month. The college matching feature was received very positively.  One user had this to say, "If I would have seen this earlier, I might have applied to a couple more schools. All of my top 3 choices were near the top of this list, and there were other colleges that I wish I had known about before."

Based on feedback from users, Hobsons will continue to add features and adjust the matching algorithm to improve the tool. To see the future of college search, visit College Confidential at http://www.collegeconfidential.com.

About Hobsons

Hobsons is a premier provider of innovative technology and integrated marketing solutions that empower education professionals to manage the entire student lifecycle including recruitment, enrollment, and retention. With end-to-end, enterprise-class products built from over thirty years of education experience and market knowledge, Hobsons helps more than 5,000 global secondary schools, colleges, and universities achieve their goals. A Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) subsidiary, Hobsons is headquartered in Cincinnati, OH with offices in Washington DC; Fairfax, VA; Oakland, CA; London, England; and Melbourne, Australia.

For more information about Hobsons, please visit http://www.hobsons.com.

SOURCE Hobsons