Young Entrepreneurs Making College More Attainable & Affordable

I found these guys on Inc. Magazine's website. I was tipped off by Fast Company via Twitter:)


photo: Jason Shah

A junior at Harvard University, Jason Shah launched his SAT prep site INeedAPencil.com in 2006 when he was still in high school. The free site offers low-income students an alternative to pricier courses such as those at Kaplan and The Princeton Review. Students can log on to the site and choose from more than 60 lessons in math, reading, and writing, many of which use pop-culture and sports references to liven up the material. It's not just a gimmick -- a random sampling of the site's users showed an average improvement of 202 points on their SAT scores. INeedAPencil.com earns most of its revenue by generating leads for colleges and universities eager to recruit the site's 30,000 users, who can opt in to receive information about different schools.

Jason is a Sparkseed Innovator. For more info about Sparkseed see this previous blog post.



photo: Troy Rhodes

When Troy Rhodes, a junior at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, sold his college textbooks at the end of the spring 2008 semester, he received $18 -- for books that cost him $560 just a few months earlier. There had to be an alternative way, he thought. So over the next year, he developed MyBookBorrow.com, which allows students anywhere to save on textbooks by renting instead of buying. When a student requests a textbook, Rhodes (or one of the three friends who assist him) finds a used copy from one of the two textbook distributors that are his suppliers. He then provides a rental quote (after checking on competitors' rental prices and Amazon's purchase price) to the student. If the student agrees to the price, Rhodes buys the book and has the supplier ship it directly to the customer. When the semester ends, the customer ships the book back to Rhodes, who keeps his stock in a $22-a-month storage space.