Glad to see a member of my blogroll, USphere, get a nice writeup on TechCrunch on Tuesday. (Actually it wasn’t the blog on my blogroll that got the writeup, but the startup company of the same name.)
As TechCrunch puts it:
Usphere lets students fill out a single application and be considered by their network of colleges. When you’ve completed the application, it’s tossed into their applicant search engine and only accessible by the 33 schools in their network. If a school likes you, they email you an acceptance letter complete with a bottom line price tag to attend. The application service costs $65, although they have several free college search tools.
Interesting timing, in light of what U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has been saying about the need to simplify the “Byzantine” financial aid application process.
Spellings criticized the cumbersome federal financial aid application process, calling it “redundant, confusing, Byzantine and broken … a maze of 60 Web sites, dozens of toll-free numbers and 17 different programs.â€
Maybe USphere can try to help Secretary Spellings develop the killer financial aid app app.
Andrew Careaga 
We’d be happy to help Secretary Spellings with this whole thing…of course, we’ve got a bunch of ideas about how to make the system work better for everyone.
Mission one might be to start with “sticker price.” Saturn did it with autos in the early 90s — the price is what the price is. What you have now is a labyrinth of FAFSA and EFC and merit aid and tuition discounts and scholarships and PLUS loans and private loans and student loans and…
It’s like flying: you sit next to a guy in economy who paid a lot more and you don’t want to talk about it.
Meanwhile, though, students have a grand design on what they want — place, proximity, weather, professors, extracurriculars, etc. Let’s get to the point where that gets factored into the equation, too.
Where to start???