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BUSINESS PROFILE MAKING COLLEGE MORE AFFORDABLE ONE SCHOLARSHIP AT A TIME
Today, Going Merry works with 10,000 high schools all over the United States. The organizations they’ve partnered with include major international companies like Dell and Hewlett-Packard as well as local organizations like the Rotary Club and Kiwanis. Even if wages aren’t increasing at the same rate as the cost of college, Going Merry’s operations are certainly keeping pace. In the spring of 2018, Caitlin Phan received her letter of acceptance into UC Berkeley. A degree from Berkeley doesn’t come cheap, and Caitlin did her best to apply for scholarships and mitigate that cost. She estimated that she had applied to over 200 scholarships to little avail. But, with the help of Going Merry, she received not one, but two scholarships that would total about $14,000. “It was pretty exciting knowing I won’t have to take out loans the first year,” Caitlin said in an interview with the Bay Area’s local ABC station. Caitlin’s experience with Going Merry is just one of thousands of similar experiences. And even though the money she received was just for her first year, in an era where crushing student debt feels ubiquitous, every little bit helps. Going Merry is a modern solution to a modern problem. The bill for education continues to rise with no peak in sight. So, until wages go up or the cost of college goes down, apps like Going Merry will continue leading the charge to help an upcoming generation of workers find their place in the workforce.
The basic mechanics of the app are simple and user-friendly. Students begin by filling out a brief profile. Then, the app auto-fills any scholarship application form with the answers they provided on their profiles. After that, students will only have to add scholarship essays or answer a few additional questions on the actual application. With Going Merry, you’ll never have to answer the same question twice. Going Merry’s creators tested the app’s usability at three California high schools — a test that proved incredibly successful. The classes that got to use the app ended up applying for five times as many scholarships as the previous class, and guidance counselors at the school hailed the app as the easiest platform they had ever used. Since Going Merry’s initial development, its creators have added more features to the app’s base functions. Some of these features include options to further filter their scholarship searches, “bulk applications” that bundle scholarships with similar prompts, and even tools that help students find out how much their target colleges cost and how much the average salary is for graduates. The cost of college is always changing, and the creators of Going Merry have shown that they’re willing to keep innovating to help students keep up with their pursuits of higher education.
The cost of a college degree comes at a pretty penny these days. In the past decade especially, the price has skyrocketed, costing 55% more to attend a public university than it did just 10 years ago. Furthermore, the price of college is increasing at a rate that is eight times faster than the average working wage. Many students feel that the only way they can pursue higher education is by taking on gargantuan student loans, but a lucky few are able to fund their college education — or at least their tuition —with scholarships. Unfortunately, websites that consolidate information on reputable scholarships for students are few and far in between. That’s why in 2016, a group of Carnegie Mellon and Stanford graduates, all grappling with the cost of their higher education and how to pay for it, created Going Merry. In an age that has spawned Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, and Uber, apps that make any process more efficient or less costly have the potential to change the world. Going Merry is an app that allows students to avoid the tedium and uncertainty of the scholarship application process. Instead of having to follow countless links to scholarship websites that may or may not be scams to harvest students’ data, Going Merry gives students a place to efficiently apply for tons of legitimate scholarships that they qualify for.
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