A company that has developed net-price calculators for some of the nation’s top colleges is blocking access to an aggregator’s computer servers, allegedly at the request of some of those college clients.
The move by the Rezolve Group, which prevents College Abacus from accessing the clients’ calculators, means that prospective students cannot use the aggregator’s website to compare cost estimates from Yale, Cornell, and hundreds of other universities and colleges. While students can still find the calculators on the colleges’ own websites, they will have to enter their financial information separately for each institution and make their own comparisons.
Craig V. Carroll, the founder and chief executive of the Rezolve Group, said it took action late last week after “a couple” of clients questioned the accuracy of College Abacus’s results, and complained that they were being asked to pay for the names of students who had requested estimates for their institutions.
“They’re very suspicious of a business model that relies on prowling for colleges’ net-price calculators, scraping the data, and then selling names back to them,” he said. He added that College Abacus was violating his clients’ intellectual-property rights and terms of use, which specify that the calculators are intended for personal use only, and that users may not sell any data that they generate.
But Abigail P. Seldin, chief executive and co-founder of College Abacus, said she had not received any complaints about the site’s accuracy and asserted that Mr. Carroll didn’t mention such concerns when he notified her that his company planned to block Abacus’s Internet Protocol address. Instead, he explained, his clients did not want to be compared with their peers based on price, she said. She provided copies of several terms of use that do not mention sales restrictions, though they do say that the colleges retain all rights, title, and interest in the calculators.
Although Abacus’s website says it makes money by connecting colleges to prospective students, Ms. Seldin said the company had not yet ventured into “lead generation"—selling colleges the names of potential applicants—and probably would not. The company, which has received funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, tried selling colleges data comparing their net prices to their peers’, she said, but abandoned the product due to a lack of interest.
Colleges ‘Didn’t Want to Be Compared’
Abacus does, however, sell a product that competes with one of the Rezolve Group’s. For a fee of $75, it will provide users with a personalized net-price estimate for the top 100 colleges or universities in the United States, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Studentaid.com, a subsidiary of the Rezolve Group, sells comparisons of up to six colleges for $49 and up to 10 for $99.
But while Abacus relies on colleges’ net-price calculators for its estimates, the Rezolve Group relies on data that institutions report to the U.S. Department of Education. Mr. Carroll said that is “at the express wishes of the colleges,” which “didn’t want to be compared side by side.”
His clients, he said, “are very sensitive to being compared on price” alone.
“They want the ability to connect with somebody and educate them about the value they offer,” he said.
Mr. Carroll said that Abacus was “not really a competitor” because his business focuses on selling technology and services to colleges. The “cost and planning reports” that Rezolve offers to prospective students are a small part of the company’s portfolio, he said.
The Chronicle contacted more than a dozen colleges that are clients of the Rezolve Group to see if they had complained about Abacus. Several denied they had, and one admissions director, Faye Felterman Tydlaska of Tulane University, said it wouldn’t be in her institution’s interest to block an aggregator.
“We do offer a substantial amount of both merit and need aid to qualifying students,” she said, “and we actively encourage students to compare offers across schools to make the best decisions for them.”
David A. Bergeron, a longtime Education Department official who stepped down earlier this year, said that while Rezolve’s actions were not illegal, they were “clearly inconsistent” with the department’s efforts to facilitate cost comparisons.
“We expected that things like College Abacus would be created to exploit the net-price-calculator requirement, and that’s a good thing,” he said. “So, blocking College Abacus is not helpful and clearly inconsistent with the goal of the requirement” that all colleges offer the calculators.
The department, he added, “has a long history with fafsa.com,” a Rezolve-owned website that charges students for help in completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, and “doesn’t like its business practices.” Student Financial Aid Services Inc., the Rezolve subsidiary that runs the website, charges applicants $79 to $299 for its services.
