College Raptor launches with $2M support from Pappajohn, Ferguson, hoping to clarify the cost of college

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For many, applying to college can be a confusing and intimidating process. But for William Staib, a serial entrepreneur with a background in data science, seeing the promotional materials and paperwork stack up sparked an idea for a new business.

“For me, a mess is a good thing – how do we get our heads around this, how can we make it better?" he said.

Staib officially launched College Raptor earlier this month, hoping to make finding and comparing the true net cost of college easier for students and parents. The startup has already attracted interest from some of Iowa's notable investors, including John Pappajohn, legendary Iowa businessman, and Richard Ferguson, former CEO of ACT, who have led a $2 million round of series A funding in College Raptor.

Students using the website can enter details such as majors they are considering, home state and how far away the college should be, family information and academic data like GPA and ACT scores. College Raptor then provides a list of matching schools, each with an estimated net price, a rating of how confident that estimate is, and acceptance odds for each school.

“What was shocking to me was the difference between the sticker price and the net price,” Staib said, adding that for many students, private colleges with well-funded endowments and scholarship programs can actually be more financially feasible than seemingly affordable in-state schools. “That struck me as an opportunity. You don't buy a car without knowing what it will cost. Applying for schools in the fall, and then figuring out in the spring, in April, that your dream school is out of reach, it's a backward process.”

Student debt is an issue in Iowa and across the nation, with the class of 2013 graduating with an average of nearly $30,000 in debt, according to the Institute for College Access and Success.

College Raptor uses several data sources to estimate the net price of college, including public data provided by colleges that receive federal student aid, price calculators on college's own websites that factor in costs like room and board, FAFSA equations that estimate a family's expected contribution and feedback from users.

Staib started working on the product in the fall of 2011, when his oldest of five children was applying for colleges. Although the website has launched, he believes "any good tech is never done," and he plans to use part of the $2 million investment to hire technical talent.

Most of the funding, however, will be used to market the site. Attracting a large user base will help make the price estimates more accurate, and more importantly, attract college partners.

Staib hopes to monetize College Raptor by helping colleges target interested potential students. Thanks to online applications, today's students can easily apply to more colleges, and the schools don't know which ones are truly interested. Colleges then spend their marketing budgets sending out mail to students who might not be interested at all (case in point: just this month, the University of Iowa mistakenly sent recruiting letters to more than 1,000 elementary school students). College Raptor hopes these schools will pay to get in touch with students who have indicated their interest in a match.

“Colleges don't want more applications, they want more focused, better-fit applicants,” he said.

Before starting College Raptor, Staib was the CEO of Neural Applications, which later became Stockpoint. That Coralville-based company provided financial data and modeling software, and grew rapidly before applying for a public offering in 2000. However, thanks to the dot-com bust, the public offering was never completed, and the company was later sold to Dow Jones.

Staib's relationship with Pappajohn dates to the Stockpoint days. He met College Raptor's other lead investor, Ferguson, this summer as a mentor for the Iowa Startup Accelerator. The 38-year veteran of ACT, who is also an investor in Coralville-based Higher Learning Technologies, brings an insider's look at the education business to College Raptor.

“I looked at a lot of these problems as a complete outsider,” Staib said. “It forced me to learn everything, which is great – but it's also not very efficient."

Read more about College Raptor via ICAD Group, and on collegeraptor.com.