If TripAdvisor helps travelers book the right hotel, and Zillow steers house hunters toward the perfect home, why don’t students and parents have a similar service to help them find the right college?
For John Katzman, founder and chief executive of the education-search company Noodle, this is a central question. So many industries — tourism, real estate, medicine — have a search process that provides thoughtful, thorough assistance to people sifting through large amounts of data.
Not so in education, says Mr. Katzman. “There’s a lot of information, but a lot is drivel. How do we help you cut through that and get to the options that make most sense?”
Equal parts curator and convener, Noodle aims to tidy up the education marketplace. “Make better decisions about your education,” reads the company’s home page. And the name? “When you Noodle on something, you’re thinking on something,” Mr. Katzman told The Chronicle last year.
Earlier this month, the company announced yet another new venture: Noodle Partners, an online-learning “enabler” that will help colleges develop online programs through collaborations with a variety of vendors. Noodle Partners aims to give colleges more control over the content and cost of their online programs.
The Noodle ventures are just the latest for the 55-year-old Mr. Katzman. In 1981 he founded the Princeton Review and in time became an outspoken critic of the SAT and the College Board. In 2008 he started the distance-education company 2U as a way to help elite institutions offer online courses.
Noodle began in 2010. Its sleek, user-friendly platform taps into a deep database that covers just about every aspect of education, from kindergarten through Ph.D. programs. Need a summer camp for your dyslexic child? A community college close to home? A graduate program in biology?
Along with thousands of profiles of colleges, the site also features articles penned by a team of experts designed to demystify the search process. The experts field myriad questions from users — about 40 a day — and then post searchable answers online. “Free Community College — Will It Really Solve the Problem?” reads one post. And another: “Find Colleges With Gender Neutral/LGBT Housing Options.”
Mr. Katzman has run the company since late 2012. “We’re still in the foothills of really getting this thing right,” he says. It’s no easy task to gather, assess, and deliver helpful information: People don’t know what they’re looking for. Information is all over the place. Some of that information is misleading. And, let’s face it, evaluating hotels or houses is easier than evaluating colleges. The toughest questions for students and parents can’t easily be solved with an algorithm.
As an outspoken critic of the higher-education system, Mr. Katzman often uses data and blunt language to call out the sector’s flaws. But he also comes across as a tough teacher who points out weaknesses in an appeal for something better. In conversation, meanwhile, Mr. Katzman is thoughtful and self-deprecating, often pausing for long moments to choose his words.
He is also irreverent. Last year, speaking at a conference in Washington, he delivered a speech ominously titled “The Coming Education War.” But before launching into prepared remarks about accountability, choice, and deepening tensions across the education sector, he acknowledged the curse of being last to speak before the conference’s cocktail hour. Then he sipped a margarita.
Good data drowns out bad, Mr. Katzman likes to say. He’s referring specifically to lead-generation sites, which get names of prospective students and, in online searches, highlight only those colleges that pay the sites the most for “leads.” A recent Noodle survey showed that only 5 to 7 percent of respondents knew that colleges paid the lead-generation sites to be listed in search results; the majority thought they were being counseled by the sites.
Mr. Katzman’s attention to the shadier aspects of higher education doesn’t make him an alarmist, says William G. Tierney, co-director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. “There are an awful lot of Chicken Littles who say the higher-education sky is falling,” he says. But Mr. Katzman isn’t one of them: Although the entrepreneur is quick on his feet, “I would never characterize him as a provocateur,” Mr. Tierney says. “He’s a thinker and a doer.”
For Mr. Katzman, he adds, Noodle isn’t just a business plan. “He also has a vision and a mission.”
Elements of that vision are rooted in Mr. Katzman’s undergraduate days at Princeton. Long before he became a leading technology entrepreneur, he studied urban planning, earning a bachelor’s degree from the university’s architecture school.
He sees education as a complex community with many moving parts: How does information flow? What makes people care about whether the ecosystem is balanced and healthy? What enables a marketplace to work well?
Transparency and tidiness help. “When the data’s falling correctly, bad schools go away,” he says. “There’s a brutal accountability of the marketplace.”
By cleaning up the online-search process, Noodle can help the best examples shine. This is Mr. Katzman’s guiding philosophy: “To create spaces where good ideas can be seen, and win.”
