Cover letters and résumés could soon be things of the past thanks to one Mountain View, Calif. ed-tech startup.

MindSumo, founded by Keaton Swett, Trent Hazy, and Rohan Puranik, hosts what they call MindSumo Challenges. These contests test specific skill sets to help companies recruit talent. Currently about 75 percent of its challenges are geared toward engineers.

Companies pay a fee to post contests on the MindSumo site that are open and free to students with current .edu email addresses.

For example, one of the current challenges asks students to propose an algorithm for a visual tracking system that can be used to identify endangered rhinos and protect them from poachers. The winner receives a trip to Kenya, with a seven-day stay at the Ol Pejeta preserve. They’ll tour the preserve and help implement their winning idea.

Facebook, Microsoft, Kayak, Amazon, and others have all signed on to host challenges with the company that began in 2011 as part of the Stanford Student Accelerator StartX. Last year, MindSumo raised $1 million in a seed round funding from investors including Google Ventures, Voyager Capital, and Data Collective.

Swett and Hazy, who are both half Hungarian, originally met one summer while volunteering for their churches in Hungary.

Swett, a 26-year-old Johns Hopkins University graduate and president of the company, said the premise of MindSumo Challenges is to expose students to real world situations, noting that it’s like building a portfolio to prove you’re a good candidate.

“Students don’t know where to go for opportunities they want,” Swett said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Companies find it hard to evaluate their work too, so [MindSumo] provides meaningful engagement and a greater depth of information on relevant skills.”

CEO and Stanford University alum Hazy, also 26, said MindSumo has become the token pivot story for StartX since their ideas were torn down upon entering the incubator. Essentially, they were accepted to the program because they had a strong team, but they lacked a viable company objective.

StartX mentors told them to lock themselves in a room with whiteboards and ask where they saw the world headed in five years. Hazy said this was terrifying.

“Our original idea was to build an opinion app that crowdsourced buying choices,” he said. “We realized you can monetize solutions but not opinions.”

The website has continued to evolve since. On April 22, the company launched Resume Review, which gives individualized resume feedback from a team of industry professionals and recruiting experts. They company now has eight full-time employees.

So, what advice do they have for up-and-coming entrepreneurs?

CTO Puranik and CEO Hazy

“Find the right people to start whatever you want to start,” Swett said. “Most startups fail because of founder issues. It’s also important to be very straightforward about the vision you have and be flexible about it.”

Hazy said that an important phrase to remember during the startup process is the idea of an unfair advantage.

“You have either the connections or skills,” he said. “You need to dig and figure out where you can pull on levers.”

Swett said MindSumo is different from their competitors, such as College Feed and Ready Force, since MindSumo is not just a database of profiles.

Find out more about the startup here.

Top image: MindSumo founders: CTO Rohan Puranik (left), Trent Hazy (center) and Keaton Swett (right). Photo credit: Courtesy

This is a guest post by Dale Stephens, founder of the “UnCollege” movement 

At the 2007 EG Conference for youth and young adults, Kevin Kelly told the audience that 10 years ago no one would have believed the Internet was coming, least of all him.

If someone told us that we would all be connected and have access to literally all of the world’s information, we would have said that it was impossible. What I’m here to say today is that education is being transformed by technology. The future is here, but educators and deans, the ones who hold the gauntlet, are choosing not to believe it.

I run UnCollege, an organization that believes that college isn’t the only path to success. The idea was forged during my time at the Thiel Fellowship program (fellows are given $100,000 to forgo college and “make something amazing”). Of course, many people would disagree with the sentiment that I’ve created something worthwhile. In fact, critics say I’ve created something destructive. Naturally, I disagree.

Why do I believe that college is not the only path to success? It’s the technologies that we’ve grown accustomed to. But the problem is that not everyone is seeing the ramifications of what this access means.

We now live in a “connection economy.” You can access someone just by emailing them. You can connect to people through social media, and I’ve corresponded with, and have met, thought leaders through the Internet. What you’re looking at is, as Seth Godin puts it, “the connection machine.”

I’d argue that the access you get from being connected levels the playing field. Now, you can complete an internship with a Silicon Valley startup, even if you live in the middle of Idaho. Being connected means you get access to people who you normally couldn’t even shake hands with. Now, all you have to do is reach out and you’re in. I’ve gotten backed by the first investor of Facebook, launched a social organization that’s barged its way into the pages of The New York Times and CNN, and have connected with thought leaders I would have never dreamed of speaking with. How? It’s because the Internet connected me to them. Twenty years ago, who knows — if I’d dropped out of college, I may have just ended up smoking pot in my parent’s basement.

But I’ve been able to marshall online resources to avoid that frightening fate. I’d argue that technology has intensified the resources we’ve grown accustomed too so much that it’d be a huge mistake not to take advantage.

Unlike college, the beautiful thing about these resources is that they’re practically free. Online courses, internships, apprenticeships, apps, videos, and essays now offer not only the latest, but the best education you can get.

If you’d like to completely recreate the college experience for the cost of free, you can just use Massive Online Open Courses (often referred to as “MOOC’s”) to replace lectures. These include Udacity, Khan Academy, and M.I.T Open Course Software. (Here’s a list of the best resources we’ve found. Not only are they free, but you can learn at your own pace. You can’t pause real professors.)

Now, we have connection. Now, we have the resources. What do colleges have? They have an arbitrary credibility marker, and besides that, they very well could be broke. But they aren’t — and it’s because we’re still buying into the big myth. Technology has, and will, change education. When you see people looking up philosophical texts on their iPhones, how can you still say that education is limited to the walls of a college?

Ten years from now, speakers will remark on how far we’ve come and how surprising this would have seemed a few short years ago. Technology will make education even more accessible and more reliable than it has today. The real question is, when will the educators in charge finally start to believe that?

Dale Stephens is the founder of UnCollege.org, author of Hacking Your Education to be published on March 5th from Penguin, and a 2011 Thiel Fellow. 

ABC keyboard image via Elnur // Shutterstock

StudentLoanHero is a startup that gives student borrowers tools to repay their loans faster. The company just closed a seed round with Expansion VC and was accepted into the latest batch at the Socratic Labs EdTech Accelerator in New York City.

Students and grads carry more than $1 trillion in student debt right now, and 65 percent of borrowers misunderstand their student loan obligations

“Unlike the mortgage crisis, student loans are not dischargeable through bankruptcy, nor do you have an asset to liquidate,” said CEO Andrew Josuweit in an interview. “Student Loan Hero is on a mission to not only help the 37 million borrowers with outstanding loans but to also pave the path for greater financial literacy and transparency. At age 17, very few borrowers are in the position to make an educated decision on a $100,000 investment, yet our financial aid system does not provide borrowers with the financial literacy necessary to make such a significant life-changing decision.”

Josuweit said students loans are now the second largest form of household debt, surpassing credit cards and auto loans. When he graduated from college, Josuweit had 16 loans from four banks tolling $104,000. Staying on top of his debt was overwhelming and time-consuming. He didn’t have access to the tools or guidance he needed to effectively manage his finances, and so he founded a startup.

On the StudentLoanHero, students can stay organized by viewing all their loans on one dashboard and rank them by importance. The site also offers repayment strategy suggestions and sends monthly payment reminders. Users create a profile with information that aggregates their financial data. The technology then analyses their loan portfolios to find potential savings, such as prepayment options and financial offers. It also helps borrowers identify programs that might reduce or postpone monthly payments.

Since launching in September, StudentLoanHero has reviewed over $60 million and is growing substantially every month. The average customer has eight loans and $55,480 in student loan debt, but some students with upward of 25 loans and $300,000 in debt.

The company claims to save the average customer $6,000 over the lifetime of their loan repayment, not counting the net savings that result from improved financial literacy. The service is free, but Josuweit said the financial data aggregation technology is proprietary, which paves the way for media partnerships and work with affiliates on revenue campaigns.

Competitors include Tuition.io and LoanLook, but considering the size of the problem and the tremendous need to fix it, the more the merrier. StudentLoanHero currently has five employees and is backed by Startup Chile and Expansion Venture Capital. 

Entrepreneurship is not necessarily the quickest route to loan repayment, but it is one that will help others eliminiate their debt along the way.

Photo Credit: Mr Moss/Flickr

American companies are obsessed with hiring Harvard grads and Wharton MBAs. This is true of the tech industry, even extending into startups, driving entry-level top school CS bachelor’s degree grad salaries into the six figures in the Bay Area.

Everyone agrees that better talent leads to better outcomes. But are the most highly academically-credentialed among us the most talented?

Related: Longtime tech recruiter shatters the engineering shortage myth

Certainly a higher percentage of graduates from the best schools are very talented, but today great people from other backgrounds are relatively undervalued by comparison to Ivy Leauge grads. For someone in charge of recruiting, it’s a lazy heuristic to “only hire from top schools” — and one that will put you in fierce competition with pretty much every well capitalized competitor out there.

Steve Jobs was a Reed College dropout. Some of the best hires we’ve ever made had terrible paper credentials.

Ammon, a brilliant engineer who ran Justin.tv’s video system and went on to co-found the Socialcam spin-off, came from a “terrible school” by his own admission. Later, when Socialcam grew to over 100 million users, he and one other technical founder scaled the infrastructure alone.

Jacob, our designer and first hire at Justin.tv, now Twitch’s director of product, hadn’t finished college in New Mexico and had almost no web design experience. He turned out to be one of the most versatile designers I’ve worked with; over the past seven years, he’s worked on visual design, user experience, and front-end implementation, often playing a role that would have been three jobs at another company.

Speaking as a graduate of one such institution, top schools teach you credentialing and ladder climbing. If you’re lucky, you might learn how to create a financial model or craft a solid argument.

They don’t make you a great UX designer or programmer. Your passion for learning and gaining more and more experience are what make you great. The nights you stayed up until 5 a.m. coding make you great. Your love of building things makes you great.

I want to hire hungry creative kids that want to step up: the best programmers from shitty schools and wannabe designers who dropped out of film school. Network engineers who started off as college dropouts but figured it out from years of on the job experience learning to be the best. Dev Bootcamp grads without any experience but who have spent every day and night the last six months programming.

I don’t give a shit where you went to college as long as you’re talented.

Justin Kan is the CEO at Exec, a venture-backed startup based in San Francisco. His previous startup, Justin.tv, pioneered the live-streaming video space and gave rise to lifestreaming and the first crop of web video stars. This post originall appeared on the Exec blog.

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A crowning accomplishment of my teenage years was the custom version of Clue I made with a few friends, complete with a board, game pieces, and playing cards. Beyond the enjoyment of accusing our P.E. teacher of smothering victims with Sloppy Joes in the auditorium, this game contributed little to our futures.

A startup called MakeGamesWithUs is elevating this type of adolescent undertaking by teaching high school and college kids how to build iPhone games.

MakeGamesWithUs graduated from the YCombinator Winter 2012 and just launched its first social game in the AppStore. On the website, students take project-based tutorials that focus on hands-on, practical experience, rather than theory. Once they feel confident in their iPhone game development skills, they can begin building original games.

Students can engage with the MakesGamesWithUs community during the development process to get help, give/receive feedback, nurture ideas, and troubleshoot problems. As it nears completion, the MakeGamesWithUs team will incorporate professional art and music, help with debugging, and assist in adding trickier features. When the game is ready, MakeGamesWithUs will publish and promote the games for a share of the revenue.

To date, the startup has published seven games on the App Store. It just launched its first social game, Name That Jam!, where groups of friends challenge each other to name songs, earning more points the faster they guess. The game was built by a brother and sister team, still in high school, using MakeGamesWithUs’ Turn Based Multiplayer software development kit (SDK). This new tool makes it easy for aspiring developers to build social games, even without back-end knowledge.

“We founded the company to solve a problem we had when we were students,” said founder Ashu Desai. “This type of practical education is lacking from the traditional education system. Having built and shipped a product at an early age can really impact your outlook on life. We hope to inspire people to invest their time in both computer science as well as entreprenuership.”

MakeGamesWithUs has an educational as well as a publishing component. This distinguishes it from competitors like GameSalad and Chillingo, which support design/development and publishing (respectively), but not both. In some ways, it is like an incubator program for young iOS developers, providing the resources, support, and platform needed for success and taking a cut off the hits.

Instead of working on their tan or earning extra cash as a lifeguard, a group of 40 students spent their summer plugging away in the founders’ Palo Alto living room. The fruits of these labors will bloom over the couple of months, as MakeGamesWithUs plans to release 15 new games created during the internship program.

With all the laments echoing around the technology community about the shortage of engineering talent, this company is grooming kids early for careers as gaming moguls. Camp counseling is so 1990s anyway.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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AfterCollege, which bills itself as the largest career network for college students and recent grads, helps hundreds of thousands of college students all over the country find the best career opportunities. As part of the career exploration process, students select companies they most want to apply to, and AfterCollege shared some of that data with VentureBeat.

“It’s a reflection of an employer’s brand with students,” AfterCollege’s chief executive Roberto Angulo told me. “The data comes from 200,000 students at 2,000 college campuses.”

AfterCollege segments its data by type of student. Google heads the list of who tech students in computer science disciplines most want to work for, followed by Microsoft and Intel. Apple shows up right behind IBM, in fifth spot.

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Intel
4. IBM
5. Apple
6. Amazon
7. National Security Agency
8. Facebook
9. NVIDIA
10. AT&T

For engineering students, the list looks a little different — kind of like a who’s-who of the military-industrial complex. IBM sinks to 9th, and Google and Apple disappear entirely. Intel, however, maintains its high ranking.

1. Boeing
2. Intel
3. Lockheed Martin
4. General Electric
5. Raytheon
6. NASA
7. Exxon Mobil
8. National Security Agency
9. IBM
10. The Aerospace Corporation

Business students, on the other hand, are much more interested in banks, consulting agencies, and telecommunications giants. But Google holds a fascination for business majors (who apparently haven’t been told yet that Google prefers CompSci majors), and Apple reappears at the bottom of the list. Intel, surprisingly, is high on yet another list, in fourth position.

1. Wells Fargo
2. Google
3. Target
4. Intel
5. JPMorgan Chase
6. AT&T
7. Bank of America
8. Deloitte
9. T. Rowe Price
10. Apple

I found it interesting that Facebook appears on only one of the lists, so I asked Angulo about the world’s largest social network, which famously started on college campuses.

“Facebook hovers from seven to eight” based on all the lists combined, Angulo said. “Even though 90% of our users are on Facebook, it doesn’t mean they want to work there.”

And as for Apple, which ranked fifth on the computer science students’ list, behind first-place Google, and tenth on another?

“Google has a very good on-campus recruiting program and is thought to have better work-life balance,” Angulo told me. “So while Apple may be a good company to invest in, it may not be the best company to work for.”

photo credit: Kris Kesiak Photography via photopin cc, fisserman via photopin cc

I was so clueless what to do when I graduated from college that I joined the Peace Corps. While this worked out well for me, the solution to rising levels of unemployment and uncertainty about  the future is not always to go live in a rural village. It could be to work for a startup, and recruiting network Readyforce is embarking on a cross country bus trip to connect college kids with jobs in the technology industry.

Readyforce is a platform that brings together top engineering students with fast growing startups. Students and startups can enter their search parameters and receive relevant results. It is a tool for students looking for jobs and companies looking for hires, and provides a more specific, curated alternative to traditional job search sites.

This grand adventure is called Hacker Tour. On a bus emblazoned with startup logos, a Readyforce team is visiting 19 campuses in 11 states. The journey kicked off at Cornell University in mid-September and since has stopped off at top engineering schools like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and Harvey Mudd. Still ahead are University of Texas- Austin and Stanford.

Readyforce is touring on behalf of 150 technology companies, including hot startups like Square, Box, Etsy, and Chegg, and large corporations, like security company Raytheon. The crew sets up booths at career fairs, makes presentations to students, and holds their own events where students can learn more about careers in startups and technology. Rather than handing in a resume or standing stiffly in a suit, the college kids are presented with an alternative method of finding the perfect job.  

I chatted with Readyforce executive Anna Binder while she was at the University of California-Berkeley campus. Binder has worked in HR for technology companies for over a decade and said the climate for developer recruitment is changing.

“Connecting technical students to tech startups wouldn’t have worked 10 years ago,” she said. “Back in the early 2000s, the appetite for college hires not very high. Startups didn’t have the overhead for sophisticated training programs or recruiting tools. Today, people are getting more creative and resourceful about how solving talent problem. They are open to engineers fresh out of school. Not only are they cheaper, but if you light up somebody early in their career, you can grow, motivate and inspire them. They will be willing to walk on fire for you.”

While it may be more risky than a job at a firmly established business, startups have a lot to offer twenty-somethings who are just entering the workforce. Perks like a more casual work environment and a steady stream of parties aside, there are learning opportunities that arise from being part of a small team.

“Part of our message is be the CEO of your own career,” Binder said. “Often, you go to your first job out of college because somebody expects it of you, or it was presented to you, or its what your parents feel good about. Going to a startup is an amazing place to start your career because you can have a huge impact in  short amount of time. Things progress really fast, it is a good place to take risks, you can make mistakes and learn from then.

While students may want to work for startups and startups may want to hire recent graduates, there are obstacles to connecting the two that Readyforce strives to overcome. Startups do not have the capital, bandwidth, or time to travel the country visiting college campuses, and most students do not have the on-the-ground network that is such a significant part of developer recruitment. Furthermore, startups often do not post position openings on public job boards. By using Readyforce, they can extend their reach to universities around the country without having to strain resources.

Companies create profiles that students can peruse on the site, including information about the industry, location, number of employees etc…Profiles are ranked by level of completeness and students can “Get Introduced” directly on the site. Students also create profiles with information about their educational background, skill sets, and what they are looking for. Readyforce works on both ends to make the best matches.

The Hacker Tour is both a marketing campaign for Readyforce (which is itself a startup), but also a way to raise awareness about entrepreneurship as a viable career path and let students know the scope of their options and make the connections they need. In case the prospect of 2 years in a 115 degree rice paddy isn’t appealing.

Readyforce is based in San Francisco, CA and has raised $14 million in venture funding.

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Schoolyard has opened the gates to its platform that lets students raise money directly from alumni.

Traditionally when alumni want to support students at their alma mater, they donate to the university, which then distributes the money. This puts a large institutional middleman between the alumni and the students. Schoolyard’s vision is to provide an off-campus, online opportunity for alumni to fund students, groups, and projects they believe in. This can benefit students who are unable to procure university funding, as well as alumni who want to have more control and engage on a deeper level with their chosen causes.

On Schoolyard, students can create or join groups and create profiles for their cause, true to crowdfunding website form. They can then raise awareness for their organization, track membership, collect dues, plan events, communicate with the network, and raise money, as well as interact with interested alumni who may be able to offer guidance and other non-financial resources.

“Donating and fundraising for universities and students is broken right now,” said CEO Dan Gailey. “The real disconnect is because the schools don’t really understand how alumni would like to donate, and alumni don’t have an easy way to give back to the things that mattered most to them. We want to enable people to give to projects that resonate with their own beliefs and make it possible to see how their influence is making a positive impact.” 

Gailey was first inspired to create Schoolyard while leading a robotics group in college. His team attended a competition where they were overshadowed by better funded groups, and after the competition, he heard from alumni that wanted to support their project, but didn’t know how. After working for a few other startups, he decided to branch out and build Schoolyard.

Since beginning in May, Schoolyard has worked with 300 beta users across 32 universities, including Stanford, Cornell, CMU, and The University of Texas. The platform is available to students, alumni, and universities, with the ultimate goal of changing the way people donate to their alma maters.

Schoolyard is based in San Francisco.

Ironic, isn’t it, that one of Coursera’s slogans is “Higher education that overcomes the boundaries of geography, time, and money.”

Coursera, which was started by Daphne Koller and Andre Ng, two professors at Stanford University, currently offers 198 college-level courses for 1.7 million registered students, or “Courserians.” The project is funded by legendary venture capitalist John Doerr, of Kleiner Perkins, and Scott Sandell, a VC at NEA.

The organization’s goal is similar to MIT OpenCourseWare, except that Coursera is for classes from top universities all over the world.

A spokesperson for the Minnesota’s department of education told The Chronicle, a journal of higher education, that Minnesota Statutes 136A.61 to 136A.71 prohibit Coursera from offering instruction in Minnesota. Those regulations have been in place for “at least 20 years,” but, the spokesperson insisted, covered both offline and online education.

If that’s the case, Minnesota legislatures were ahead of their times, at least in some ways.

Coursera, of course, says the legislation was intended only for degree-granting institutions and that no other states have similar restrictions. But the organization has been forced to amend its terms of service, which now include:

Notice for Minnesota Users:

If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.

That, of course, is as ridiculous as it is ineffective. Coursera is delivered by the free and open Internet, so unless the state of Minnesota wants to start censoring the Internet, good luck.

I wonder if MIT OpenCourseWare is next on the hit list. While the Khan Academy should be safe — most of its courses are not university-level — I guess the lesson here is to never underestimate the power of bureaucracy.

Even over space and time.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Bill Gates has been dubbed the planet’s most generous person, and when he makes investments, the world pays attention. His foundation has given away billions of dollars in grants and donations to nonprofits working global health, poverty and development, education, and special projects like emergency response.

Very rarely, foundation money serves venture capital, but today is one of those days. The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation has made an additional investment in education startup Inigral. This follows $2 million from last year, when Inigral became the first for-profit company to receive Gates money, as well as its first investment in education technology.

Inigral is the creator of the Schools App on Facebook. It is a white-label platform that universities can use to engage students once they have been admitted in a college or university, and it monitors their progress throughout the enrollment process. Getting into college may seem like the hard part. But for many students, the acceptance letter is just the beginning of a daunting journey. Inigral functions so that students who are accepted to school go to school.

“Getting admitted to college is a big deal, but schools used to just send a letter and invite students to a terrible admission portal,” Staton said. “What we do is give them an outlet to be excited, make friends, find mentors, and get geared up. We allow schools to better serve students when and how they need it the most.”

A recent Harvard University study called “The Forgotten Summer” found that social anxiety and informational barriers are the primary reasons accepted students do not enroll. Inigral zeros in on this time between the acceptance letter and arrival at campus to smooth this transition, as well as give the institutions the information they need to retain their students.

In its inception, Inigral was designed as a communication tool, a private social network where people could build relationships and get involved with their college or university. Its data shows that students who use the Schools App are far more likely to continue down the road of higher education, and yet an increasing number of students are changing their minds in the middle of the summer. Inigral realized that universities could put its information to constructive use and is shifting to a more data driven approach.

“We are moving our product towards enrollment intelligence,” Staton said. “We look at how demographic and behavioral data relates to actual engagement. We want to find a secret algorithm that says which students need more information about what and what kind of support they need.”

One of the goals of the Gates Postsecondary fund is to increase the number of low income and minority students that are graduating with the credentials they need to succeed in the job market. Inigral’s core mission aligns with this goal, and the financial boost will help develop the analytic technology to the point where it can make a real difference.

Since the $4 million round closed last year, Inigral has expanded its platform from 15 to 110 schools, with a goal of 200 to 300 by next year. Other investors include Retro Venture Partners and Founders Fund.

Meritful is a platform where high school students aged 13-18 can create a professional online identity while hooking into mentorship opportunities in education and the workforce. The company launches into public beta on Monday.

A sample page on Meritful

“College admissions officers look for you online,” says chief executive and newly-minted comp-sci PhD Azarias Reda, who used to work for LinkedIn. “So it’s really important to have a great polished profile on the web.”

LinkedIn itself is not an option: Kids are not welcome, and due to LinkedIn’s work history orientation, it’s not suitable either. And the existing portfolio sites, Reda argues, lack the mentorship opportunities Meritful provides.

In addition, they lack connection to schools.

For the past six months, Reda and his team have been working with four Michigan high schools in a private beta. Next week, the platform will be open to the world. Schools can join, bringing their students with them. But Reda is most excited about individual students sharing the network with their friends and growing virally.

“We want it to be something that students do because it’s cool,” he says.

Students have school pages, and can see the hottest and most exciting projects and portfolio items their friends are sharing.

The company is funded with $25,000 in friends and family money and support from an accelerator, Ann Arbor’s SPARK.

Image credit: Thomas Photography/ShutterStock

College campuses are becoming incubators for startups, offering encouragement in the form of classes to nurture young dreamers. This explains the influx of 21-year-olds making millions of dollars in investment before they can legally pop a beer.

Given the amount of preparation and forethought it takes to start a company, you may think it ludicrous to expect entrepreneurial success in a semester or two.

Yet, a handful of programs across the country have produced their fair share of fresh-faced CEOs. The lesson here? If they can do it in 10 weeks on a shoestring budget, you can too. The nationwide frenzy for entrepreneurship can in large part be attributed to a select group of college classes that train and mould lazy co-eds into fully-fledged business leaders.

Here is my run-down of the leading college classes that serve as launchpads for startups.

Stanford University 

Launchpad: Design and Launch your Product or Service is not for the fainthearted. As the course description warns, you better have a burning desire to start a company. Those who are merely interested in becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg need not apply.

In just 10 weeks, students apply the values of design thinking, including protoyping, testing and iterating, marketing, distribution and presentation, to launch a successful startup. Do not expect to sleep. In return, the course directors (Perry Klebahn, former CEO of Timbuk2, and Michael Dearing, former eBay SVP) promise to change your life.

Brainstorming startup ideas at Stanford’s d.school

I believe it. The course is one of the most over-subscribed of all the classes at the “d.school”, Stanford’s illustrious design program founded by David Kelley, IDEO’s CEO. IDEO has already achieved iconic status as the firm that designed Apple’s first mouse.

Success story? Pulse News, an app that has raised over $10 million in funding to date. Cofounder Akshay Kothari’s reflections on the class: “The instructors force you to sign a paper which says you won’t get a grade for the class until you have publicly launched your product in the 11 weeks of class. Just build your product, and get it out the door. My cofounder and I built Pulse from scratch in five weeks.”

Stanford is a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. Other options include Digital Media Entrepreneurship (for fellow new media enthusiasts), The Graduate School of Business’ startup class S356, and the d.school’s Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability.

MIT
MIT’s New Enterprises is far more quant-heavy than Stanford’s free-thinking, post-it loving design school. Students are led through a rigorous and analytical step-by-step process on developing a team, forming a business plan, raising funds, and combating any potential legal issues that may arise. It’s like bootcamp for nerds.

As you are reminded before enrolling, alumni have subsequently made billions of dollars in shareholder value and have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors. Lark (a silent alarm clock and sleep sensor) and Hubspot (marketing software for small and mid-sized businesses) are a tough act to follow.

The class has been around for several decades and is currently taught by the co-founder of Battery Ventures, Howard Anderson. Anderson is not looking for “cute little nonprofits”, he explains on the explanatory video, so bring your fair trade eco-clothing line elsewhere.

Success stories? A123 Systems (high-performing battery maker for electric vehicles), Hubspot, and Lark.

Washington University
Hatchery, the capstone class at the school’s center for entrepreneurship, boasts an unbeatable track record. Each year, roughly 65 percent of the class fulfills the American dream by launching a company. Ken Harrington, the course’s director, tells me here are 34 interns working this summer at ventures launched during the class.

How does it work? Entrepreneurs bounce ideas on a site for review by the students, who sign up to become team members. The fee for an outside entrepreneur in a commercial venture to participate is $3,500; it’s free for nonprofits. The students are expected to devote at least 150 hours to the class on coding, marketing, business development, and design.

The class has spawned a number of successful Internet companies in its tenure, including Rare Genomics Institute and Answers.com. It is unique in the variety of companies it produces, spanning social entrepreneurship, community projects, games, life sciences, and more.

Northwestern
NUvention, the flagship course at the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation in the engineering department, is one of the only classes that segments students based on their interests. In this case, students can select from tech, medical innovation, or energy. In the first quarter, the students develop their ideas and build a prototype, which is launched into the market during the second quarter.

Teaching a class at NUvention Energy

Previous speakers? Groupon’s founder, Andrew Mason, and Google’s feedburners founders, Dick Costolo, Eric Lunt, Steve Olechowski, and Matt Shobe. The class is taught by Todd Warren, an alum who rose to the position of VP at Microsoft.

The biggest success story from the web track is Adaptly, a social media ad server and analytics platform that is generating over $10 million a year for its founders, Nikhil Sethi, 24, and Garrett Ullom, 22. Click here to review the teams from the graduating class of 2011.

Worthy of honorable mention
Check out Harvard Business School‘s Building a Successful Enterprise and the University of Michigan‘s suite of classes in the entrepreneurship track, which produced HandyLab, Inc., a diagnostics company started by Jeff Williams, which was sold to BD for $275 million. The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business offers “experiential” classes, including Ventures Lab, where students are paired with startups to gain real-world experience.

(Full disclosure: The Stanford d.school has a special place in my heart. As a humble journalist enrolled in d.garage, a program that rivals “launchpad” in its intensity, I picked up key skills like prototyping, forming a business plan, and of course, brainstorming with the trademark multi-colored post-its.)

Images courtesy of Northwestern and Stanford Universities. 

The early Facebook investor set up a program last year to give 20 teens and young adults the chance to play around with $100,000 while building a business. Now in its second year, The Thiel Fellowship is unveiling the newest fellows to join the program.

Thiel’s Fellowship is simple; select 20 promising students, no older than 20, with grand ideas to change the world or start a new business. Then, give them $100,000 over two years of the program and surround them with mentors to teach them. Instead of going straight to college, these kids learn how to start a business the “real-world” way.

Ambitions are high for the 2012 class. Taylor Wilson, 18, is the youngest person in history to create nuclear fusion and will spend time at the Fellowship producing medical isotopes for use in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Connor Zwick, 19, wants to reform the education system, starting with a mobile study tool.

It’d be most parent’s nightmare to hear their child was dropping out of college. Zwick’s parents were supportive, but hesitant.

“My parents obviously had mixed feelings [about me joining the Fellowship]. On one hand, they sort of wished I hadn’t made it and the decision to stay in school would be more obvious. On the other, they were happy because obviously being in a situation with more choices is always better,” said Zwick in an email statement to VentureBeat.

Thiel started this venture last year, pointing out that we were in an “education bubble.” Graduates leave college with thousands in debt and often few marketable skills that will get them a job, Thiel contends.

“Pundits and hand-wringers love to claim that universities are the only path to a successful life. In truth, an inquisitive mind, rigorously applied to a deep-rooted problem can change the world as readily as the plushest academic lab,” said Thiel in a statement.

The Fellowship has obviously sparked a lot of controversy. Public opinion still holds a degree in high regard and many employers require it to get a job. Few people who’ve gone through school would admit that it was a waste of time and left them with nothing but debt.

Fellows are banking on the knowledge they gain to propel their career. In a way, the risk is low for these students. They might end up with a business they can continue to grow after the Fellowship ends. And if they fail, college will still be waiting for them.

On July 11 and 12, CNBC will air a documentary about the selection process for the 2012 class. The full list of 2012 Fellows is below.

Clay Allsopp (20, Raleigh, NC) thinks people should be able to forget about technology and simply focus on being creative. His start-up, Apptory, helps individuals and businesses create and distribute content for touch-screen devices, using an intuitive, easy-to-understand interface.

Dylan Field (20, Penngrove, CA) envisions a world where people define themselves by what they create rather than what they consume. Currently stopped out of Brown University, Field is working with his former classmate Evan Wallace on making better creative tools.

Kettner Griswold (19, Bethesda, MD) and Paul Sebexen (19, Staten Island, NY) are stopping out of school to work on a benchtop genome synthesis device, which will allow individual laboratories and medical practices to synthesize large genetic constructs in-house for an unprecedented low recurring cost. This product would massively disrupt the fields of biotechnology and health care, fueling innovation and stimulating interest and research sector-wide.

Anand Gupta (20, Palo Alto, CA) and Tony Ho (19, San Jose, CA) are using their expertise in biology and computer science to transform the way doctors diagnose patients. Their service will enable doctors and researchers to receive quantitative analysis of biomedical images, allowing for faster, more accurate diagnoses of complex diseases – and more lives saved.

Spencer Hewett (20, Bryan Mawr, PA) has an insatiable passion for inventing that extends far beyond the confines of one particular industry. As a Thiel fellow, he will focus on No-Q, a fusion of radio-frequency identification (RFID) and mobile payment technology that will eliminate both checkout lines and shoplifting.

Yoonseo Kang (18, Mississauga, ON, Canada) recognizes that society’s potential for innovation and abundance can only be achieved if knowledge and the factors of production are accessible for everyone. With that in mind, Yoonseo sees open-source hardware as the key for enabling communities around the world to vastly increase their productive potential and together engage in strategic economic collaboration. To that end, he is working with Open Source Ecology to develop the Global Village Construction Set, the 50 industrial machines that it takes to build a civilization with modern comforts.

Jimmy Koppel (20, St. Louis, MO) has a passion for software engineering – and a plan to make it much more efficient. Modifying software today often involves hundreds of thousands of small, similar adjustments that require a great deal of time and money. James will fix that problem by developing new tools to automate the process.

Ryan Lelek (19, Schererville, IN) developed a passion for entrepreneurship at the age of 15, when he established his first “instant streaming” start-up. Now he’s dedicated to disrupting the computer industry, using new advances in hardware, software, and network technology. As a Thiel Fellow, he’ll continue to change the world by creating simple technology tools that empower people.

Ritik Malhotra (19, San Jose, CA) Ritik began programming at age 8; started a popular web forum at the age of 12 that grew to over 32,000 members; and ran a web hosting and software consultancy business at the age of 13, garnering over a 600x return on his initial investment. Now he wants to provide a streamlined way of discovering, sharing, and distributing content over Facebook, Twitter, and other social media services. As a Thiel Fellow, he’ll first work to build a service that allows users to share interesting media, scraped from all around the web, focusing primarily on user growth in order to build a thriving community.

Chris Olah (19, Toronto, ON, Canada) wants to use 3D printing to reduce the scope of scarcity. His goal: empower anyone with a 3D printer to make educational aids, basic scientific equipment, and tools that improve their quality of life. He is currently working on a project called ImplicitCAD, which is a math-based attempt to reinvent computer-aided design and make it more affordable.

Semon Rezchikov (18, Hillsborough, NJ) is eager to explore how synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and social network dynamics intersect. As a Thiel Fellow, he wants to develop more flexible bioautomation technologies to improve the design cycle speed, and then use those technologies to create a library of truly reliable parts – making synthetic biology more like engineering and less like science.

Omar Rizwan (18, East Hanover, NJ) wants to change the world through the control and analysis of information. Specifically, he plans to speed up progress in the field of artificial intelligence by working on the analysis of big data sets. He will aggregate large sets of data from many different Internet sources and use them to tease out trends and draw conclusions.

Tara Seshan (19, New Fairfield, CT) is dedicated to improving public health worldwide, using technology, simple solutions, and community-based change. To that end, she is developing a tool that influences analysis of data, monitoring and evaluation, and public health decision making. As a Thiel Fellow, Tara will explore developing tools that enhance public health programs that can be implemented in low-resource settings.

Noor Siddiqui (17, Clifton, VA) is inspired to galvanize people for the good of others. As a Thiel Fellow, she will work to give students across the globe access to upward mobility – and industries access to an untapped work force – with the goal of mobilizing one billion people in the next decade.

Charlie Stigler (19, Pacific Palisades, CA) has years of experience as an entrepreneur and engineer, having written the popular open-source study application, SelfControl, and founded two Web start-ups. Now he’s working on Zaption, an application that improves the usual workflow for educators and collaborators by allowing video to be integrated into interactive Web experiences and studies. He believes this technology can help solve fundamental problems, starting with that of the U.S. education system.

Ilya Vakhutinsky (20, Fair Lawn, NJ) wants to revolutionize the way the technology and health care communities work together. He is working to create a more open and transparent health care system, drastically lowering the cost of care and empowering patients to make better decisions.

Taylor Wilson (18, Texarkana, AR) became the youngest person in history to create nuclear fusion. Since then, he has produced the lowest-cost and lowest-dose active interrogation system for the detection of enriched uranium ever developed. As a Thiel Fellow, Taylor will focus on both counter-terrorism and the production of medical isotopes for use in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

Connor Zwick (18, Waukesha, WI) is passionate about education – which is why he has set out to revolutionize our country’s antiquated system using technology. As a Thiel Fellow, he will focus on Flashcards+, a mobile educational platform with a base of over 1.5 million downloads that allows anyone to learn anything using crowd sourced generated content from a database of more than 400 million flashcards.

Image of 2011 Fellowship class via Thiel Foundation

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If you think that sounds crazy, that’s because it is. But that’s precisely the message noted investor and Libertarian Peter Thiel intoned on CBS 60 Minutes Sunday. It was only the latest blast against college degrees from Thiel, who sees education as a liability rather than an asset.

Thiel made this statement based on a 2011 calculation by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, which found that plumbers make more money than doctors, under very specific circumstances. Thiel, in particular, seems hell bent on pressing the issue in the face of all evidence that college is essential to economic success. By many key economic and health measures of well being — average lifetime earnings, average salary, average unemployment rates, average life expectancy— a college degree makes a significant difference.

Thiel’s basic message is simple. We’re in a massive college bubble. Getting a four-year degree is wildly overrated. There are many lucrative jobs for people who don’t get four-year degrees. Graduate degrees, he implies, may be an even worse idea. Rather than rely on a credential, we should pursue degrees in the school of hard knocks, start a business and make a million dollars. Or fail, then try to start another one and another one. And even if you don’t want to be an entrepreneur, there are many high paying vocations that don’t require a college degree.

For his part, Thiel argues that the people who succeed would have done so regardless of whether they went to college or not. I find that argument ludicrous, all the more so looking at the paths taken by some of the people in his own Thiel 20 Fellowship program, a widely publicized offer to pay young people $100,000 not to go to college and to instead pursue an entrepreneurial idea.

First, I tracked down Kotlikoff and asked him if he broadly agreed with what Thiel was saying. The answer is: It depends. His calculation used a complicated and powerful piece of software that he has helped develop and which predicts both earnings power and available income to spend over the course of a lifetime. He presupposed that the doctors went to elite institutions for undergraduate and graduate degrees and then worked in a lower-paying medical specialty such as pediatrics or general practice. And he assumed the doctors financed their entire education without scholarships or other assistance. The calculations also did not take into account the far greater likelihood that a plumber could be unemployed or injured on the job, either of which could prove catastrophic to his or her earning power.

Likewise, if the medical school grad had worked in a higher paying specialty, they would have obliterated the earning power of even the highest paid plumber (it doesn’t take many years with earnings of over $200,000 per year to catch up). Kotlikoff makes the valid point that progressive taxes, opportunity costs and Social Security all favor the plumber over the doctor. But even according to his findings, those doctors out-earned by plumbers represent a very small fraction of the medical profession.

Let’s take apart some other aspects of his argument. Thiel also argues the college students are incurring so much debt to gain their degrees that paying off the debt is a crippling burden that takes a huge chunk out of lifetime earnings. He states that college can cost as much as $250,0000, implying that the amount is the debt load all students must bear. But, according to the Project on Student Debt, the average college debt for the class of 2010 was $25,000. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s hardly a crippling burden. To put that into perspective, the average amount financed for a new car purchased is $26,000 according to Experian Automotive statistics as reported by Bankrate.com. Even more important — and something conveniently not discussed by Thiel — the average earning power of college graduates has climbed steadily while the average earning power of those without college degrees has dropped precipitously. There is a lifetime of earnings to account for. University of Toronto‘s Martin Prosperity Institute calculatedthat, on average, bachelor’s degree holders earn $17,037 more per year than high school diploma holders.

So, while you might get lucky with that startup, the law of averages says that if you don’t go to college, you’ll probably end up significantly poorer. What was fascinating to me is that some of the young entrepreneurs Thiel bankrolled clearly benefited from partial college educations. It’s hard to imagine that the founder of the biofuels startup who was a Harvard pre-med before taking a Thiel Fellowship would have gained access to the resources he needed or been exposed to the mentorship of professors and the institutional creativity had he chosen not to go to college at all.

This is the reality: college is a formative place where creativity and ideas that turn into great companies thrive. It’s a giant R&D lab, a spectacular Petrie dish not just for scientists but for anyone who wants to learn more about the world and how to better navigate life after college. If you don’t believe that, then pick a profession that doesn’t require a degree and take your chances. You might have a nice solid life as a plumber. But the averages say, you’ll always be keeping up with the college grads.

Wadhwa is a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and is affiliated with several other universities. Read more about Vivek Wadhwa’s affiliations.

This story originally appeared on WashingtonPost.com.

Top photo: A bunch of college dropouts (the 2011 class of Thiel Fellows).

Alltuition.com launched today at the Launch conference in San Francisco, hoping to to take make the federal financial aid process more user friendly. The company helps you understand college tuition costs and payment options.

Chances are if you went to college in the United States in the last fifteen years, you filled out a Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, from the Department of Education to get money to pay for your education. It can be a tedious process with pages of questions. Having just gone through myself a few years ago, I remember hating every step of it.

This is what Alltuition is trying to solve. The company’s website walks you through the financial aid process with a much slicker interface than the DOE’s. Alltuition also shows you the actual cost of tuition at the university of your choice, including what financial aid will cover, what you’ll have to take out in loans, and how much money comes out of your pocket. After you leave school, you can continue to use the website to manage your loans.

Alltuition wants to be the “TurboTax of financial aid,” chief executive Sue Khim said today at Launch, where the company presented its idea to a panel of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

Filling out your FAFSA and browsing tuition costs are free, but when it comes time to submit forms to the government and each school you are applying to, you’ll pay Alltuition $89.

Alltuition was founded by Sue Khim, Silas Hundt, and Sam Solomon and is in the process of raising funding.

In California, there is an average of one college counselor for every 1000 high school students in the public high school system. That means counselors can offer about ten minutes of their time per student each year. Unigo, which began with the goal of building the best online college guide, is moving into a new space, looking to solve the crunch in places like California with by offering virtual college counseling through streaming web video.

Launching the virtual guidance was an effort to diversify Unigo’s revenue stream. But founder and chief executive says it has helped grow the site’s web presence as well. “We’ve been doubling our traffic every month since September and have now reached more than 1 million unique visitors a month,” Unigo founder and chief executive Jordan Goldman told VentureBeat by phone.

In September of last year, Unigo raised $1.6 million from McGraw-Hill. It was an unusual move for the textbook giant, which had never made a venture capital investment in a startup before. But it makes a lot of sense given Unigo’s new strategy. McGraw-Hill had the reputation and connections to help Unigo negotiate deals with school districts who want to cheaply expand the amount of college guidance they can offer to students. Purchasing remote video time for students is a lot less expensive  and more flexible for school districts than hiring additional full-time staff.

“There are really two sides of this story,” Goldman VentureBeat. “School districts are overwhelmed by the number of students who need help. At the same time, the law says these counselors can’t offer their services to students from their own schools after hours. Private tutoring is extremely expensive, in the thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars. So there is a real need for a more efficient way to match the supply and demand.”

Unigo is working to sign up college counselors who can earn extra income by offering their services to students who are not getting enough help at their school. Once it has a big supply of opinions from students and counselors, Goldman says Unigo plans to begin offering this data to colleges in the form of market research. “We are going to be the best resource for raw, unfiltered opinions from students and counselors about specific schools.”

In January Unigo officially relaunched as  a marketplace for college guidance, shifting the focus on its homepage to highlight 1-on-1 help from admissions and financial aid experts. McGraw-Hill is clearly hoping that the burgeoning world of online education and college guidance will help to make up for its declining textbooks sales, which have dropped each quarter for the last year and a half.

Everybody knows that if you’re smart and ambitious, you attend college. Why? Tradition. But if we’re ambitious about creating a better twenty-first century, should we follow traditions from the nineteenth?

In the past hundred years, technology entrepreneurs have given us cars, jets, vaccines, cell phones and computers. The college industry, meanwhile, has made remarkable innovations in raising prices and offering novel forms of debt.

College tuition has gone up 500 percent in the last 30 years, helping all of us speed towards bankruptcy at an even faster rate than our health care system. But while medicine has made at least some quality improvements since the early 1980s, higher education is all price and no product.

If anything, actual learning at college campuses is in decline. Today’s students report spending 75 percent of their time socializing and sleeping, leaving a scant six hours per day to attend class, study and work, according to a recent study of more than 2,300 undergrads. It’s not clear why kids should have to pay to learn how to sleep and socialize. Most people get pretty good at doing both for free.

After two years in school, the same study found that 45 percent of college students showed no significant gains in learning, and after four years, 36 percent showed almost no change in skills. More students than ever are taking six years to graduate, but no matter how many years they haunt the campus, they’re not learning anything new. Universities take in more money than ever before while failing to deliver results.

Even at schools that go out of their way to attract top talent, there’s no guarantee that a student will actually be mentored by someone with a great mind. She’s much more likely to sit in a classroom led by a low-paid teaching assistant while the famous professor plays academic politics to win government grants.

Employers make the problem worse by requiring bachelor’s degrees when hiring, but this problem can be solved with the stroke of a pen. A degree means a job candidate went to college. But what happens in college stays in college. When a company needs specific skills, knowledge, or talents, it’s better off asking for those directly. Requiring a BA guarantees nothing, and may keep out some of the most creative minds. If we replace our degree fixation with an emphasis on skills, colleges can stop sleepwalking through their stagnant four-year (and five-year and six-year) rituals and start focusing on dynamic ways to transmit skills and knowledge for actual careers.

Some employers will be slow to change, but it’s already true that you don’t need a degree to start a company, and you don’t need a degree to create a new technology that will change the world for the better. Just ask Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg or David Karp.

That’s why we started the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship. The Thiel Fellows aren’t going to college. Instead they’re designing their own projects, getting guidance from our Silicon Valley mentoring network, and learning for themselves how to do research and start companies. And instead of charging six figures, we’re giving each fellow $100,000 to rescue them from creativity-killing debt.

We’re not fixated on academic achievement. Some of our fellows ace high school, and some never fit well with traditional schooling at all. We probe how they think, what motivates them, and whether they’re truly driven to change the world. These qualities are much more powerful than a stellar GPA.

Encouraging people to skip college is controversial, but it’s a controversy that’s long overdue, and our nation’s future is at stake. Employers need to get more creative about hiring new talent instead of using meaningless proxies like BAs. We challenge students everywhere to think carefully about the costs, benefits, and risks of all their options, including college. And we challenge teens who want to change the world to apply to join us as Thiel Fellows. The future can’t wait forever.

James O’Neill runs the Thiel Foundation, which promotes science and liberty across the globe and opposes violence in all its forms. He co-founded and oversees the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, which is accepting applications through Dec 31. He also serves as a managing director of Clarium. Previously, he was the principal associate deputy secretary of health and human services. He lives in Mill Valley with his wife, Lien, and their three children.

Takeashine is a new crowdfunding platform that aims to help deserving, underprivileged youth get the money they need to continue their education.

“Takeashine has the potential to not only directly changes the lives of students, but to change the way we approach the community’s role in the process of educational access,” founder Sarah Baird said. “I think technology’s ability to create large-scale social impact is only getting started.”

This New Orleans-based nonprofit lets students close the gap between government and school estimates of financial ability and the students’ actual ability to pay for school. Because of the way the financial aid system works, young people are often assumed to have a higher “expected family contribution,” or EFC, than the amount their family or they themselves can actually afford to pay for school.

The organization currently has five fellows in New Orleans. Beginning next year, Baird hopes branch out to three cities per year over the next three years.

Baird came up with the idea for crowdfunded college aid while she was working as press secretary for the Governor of Kentucky; this idea developed further as she joined the the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools as its communications director.

“When meeting with constituents out around the state, an issue faced by families time and time again — and especially those from underserved communities — was a deep and profound concern over paying for higher education,” she told VentureBeat in an interview.

“The notion of inequality around access to higher education due to financial constraints resonated with me. While there are numerous high-level organizations working to prepare low-income students academically for college, there are no organizations to help them bridge that gap financially.”

Here’s a demo video showing more about why Takeashine is important and how it works:

Baird said her strong “belief that technology is a profound vehicle” prodded her to apply the crowdfunding model — a buzzword if ever there was one — to a real-world problem and try to make a difference.

Baird told us that college micro-lending programs do exist, but none use the crowdfunding approach. “Takeashine is different because it focuses specifically on low-income, underserved student populations for whom college is especially cost prohibitive, and the money comes as a kind of investment in the student’s future instead of a loan that must be repaid,” she said.

She also said that the organization plans to scale “in a pretty rapid fashion in order to serve as many students as possible as quickly as possible.”

Baird continued, “People frequently talk about housing bubbles and tech bubbles, but what’s often ignored is the massive higher education bubble that has caused the cost of college tuition to skyrocket over the past decade. College is now placed out of reach for many families, and in particular students from low-income backgrounds.

“The most worrisome part of this is that this trend of extreme college costs doesn’t appear to have any end in sight, making this a major hurdle both currently and well into the future.”

Takeashine is part of the Social Entrepreneurs of New Orleans New Venture Accelerator. This incubator program has allowed the startup to launch its pilot class of fellows, who are raising funds through December 15, 2011.

On February 1, 2012, the Takeashine platform will open to all students in New Orleans. “The locations we plan on targeting next are primarily in various stages of post-recession recovery, such as Detroit,” said Baird. Each location would have its own program director to manage operations and help both students and donors.

Takeashine is currently in the early stages of exploring funding and partnership options with larger organizations.

“Takeashine has the potential to not only directly changes the lives of students, but to change the way we approach the community’s role in the process of educational access,” Baird concluded. “I think technology’s ability to create large-scale social impact is only getting started.”

uTemporis

uTemporis helps you search for and prioritize fun events, movies, workshops, conferences and more. The app identifies events you have time for, as well as any that adhere to your interests, location and time available. The company uses your calendar’s API to connect and acts as a filter to your searches. It then shows you events based on your schedule.

But finding events is a crowded competitor landscape. There are household names like Yelp, Where and Yahoo Happenings, which all are locally based and show you any results, regardless of time. There are some cases where you may be willing to reschedule engagements for an event, which is where schedule-oriented search results may hit a snag.

uTemporis was founded in 2010 and is located in San Diego, Calif. The company has been self-funded and has raised around $75,000.

OneSchool — Alpha Pitch

Campuses are sprawling, and to a freshman’s eyes, all those imposing buildings can look intimidating. OneSchool shrinks that new campus onto your smartphone screen. The app contains a map of the campus, available courses, groups available on campus, university news, food in the area and a wall where students can chat freely.

The app feels very similar, if not exactly like, Facebook’s mobile application — right down to the Wall icon. Aside from the wall feature, the app is a bit static and seems like it won’t be of much use past the end of Welcome Week.

Tapps — Alpha Pitch

Tapps by TappMob, which was officially accepted into the Apple App Store yesterday, allows anyone to check-in with one tap to a chosen group of people. The company was founded by two collegians who felt their classmates need a way to quickly check-in with mom and dad, without interrupting their days.

But “one touch” and “check-in” have become mobile buzz words, and TappMob sees the need to (as LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman said at the Demo conference yesterday) break out of the noise. To set itself apart, TappMob is taking its multi-use interface and allowing students to apply it to their own use cases.

TappMob was founded this year by Eva Sasson and Justin Mardjuki.

Peek App

One of the first questions people ask when they open a shiny new smartphone box is, “What are the best apps?” The lack of app discovery is a developer bane, which the Peek app from Orange Silicon Valley wants to solve. It is doing this by allowing people to tag apps, which can then be searched through Peek App’s search engine. The engine can be white labeled as well.

The company goes up against names like GetJar that have already established themselves in the developer-focused app discovery space.

These are four of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. The Student Alpha Pitch companies are given a scholarship to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

[First image via Jaros/Shutterstock, second image from OneSchool, third image from TappMob]

The company announced a global competition Wednesday to boost the number of active college-related community sub-sites on Reddit (called Subreddits). Three subreddits with the highest level of growth between August 26 and September 30 will be awarded prizes, such as rebranding the main Reddit site with a school’s colors and mascot for a day, unique collegiate Reddit stickers and a possible meetup with Reddit staff members.

“Something we’ve seen in the past year is that local subreddits have done really well, and not just in terms of activity and growth. It’s actually very useful for people to find … others with similar interests, meetups and to stay informed,” said Reddit General Manager Erik Martin (a.k.a. Hueypriest). “Colleges were kind of the next natural step from that.”

In June, the company arranged a Global Reddit Meetup Day event to build on the trend of local community subreddits popping up on the site. Thousands of Reddit users participated in over 160 cities across the world.

Winning an official Reddit meetup on campus could be particularly appealing to students and alumni, especially since the company has a good track record on its previous meetups. For instance, its Washington D.C. rally/meetup in 2010, which gathered thousands of people and received boatloads of mainstream media attention, was heralded as an extremely enjoyable experience by those in attendance.

“Some schools have developed communities rallying behind their sports teams, others simply oriented around the student body,” writes competition organizer Josh Irwin on Reddit’s official blog. “While not every school has a top 20 athletic team, every school does have students, and all students have something to say.”

All schools are eligible to participate in the competition — provided that both the school’s name and a link to the specific subreddit appear on the site’s collegiate wiki page. The page has almost 200 colleges listed (as of today), and the majority of college subreddits have already shared the competition announcement blog post, according to Martin.

Having more college communities interacting on the site is definitely beneficial for Reddit. It will give the company new opportunities to sell unique advertising and promotion deals, which are generally accepted (and sometimes welcomed) by the Reddit community. The Reddit team has a history of trying to make its advertising efforts as valuable to users as the submitted content found on the site.

That strategy has hurt Reddit’s ability to generate revenue in the past. In turn, the low revenue made parent company Conde Nast hesitant to spend additional money maintaining the site. However, continued growth and promotional potential eventually led Conde Nast to provide the additional resources necessary for Reddit to pursue efforts like the college competition.

Martin said he hopes the competition will raise awareness about existing college subreddits and ultimately lead to higher participation in the future.

The round led by Level Equity, Five Elms Capital and Cherokee & Walker will head off the new semester season as freshmen realize, “Holy crap, books cost money…”

Ask any college student and they will tell you one thing: textbooks are expensive. Students across the country can spend upwards of $1000 for just one semester’s course materials. CampusbookRentals.com offers a cheaper study solution by allowing students to rent new and used books by quarter, semester and year.

The Utah-based company’s textbook rentals serves college students on more than 5,600 campus in the United States. Students can search for books by title, author or ISBN number. CampusBookRentals.com also buys back books, another headache for students who opted to purchase textbooks.

“We have to fill a lot of orders in a small window of time,” said chief executive Alan Martin in an interview with VentureBeat.

CampusBookRentals.com services are stretched certain months given the cyclical nature of the semester system. The company will use part of their funding to support the extra hires it makes during this time. Martin explained CampusBookRentals.com is actually able to retain employees by offering part-time off-season positions.

The funding will also be used to flesh out operations. “We didn’t outsource our warehouse operations or customer service,” said Martin, who noted that the company has finally found a facility that can sustain it for more than six months.

According to Martin, the company is on an accelerated path.  “This market has just been so crazy over the past years, we are literally just trying to keep up,” he said. In order to keep up, Martin introduced Scott Klossner, former chief financial officer of outdoor apparel retailer Backcountry.com to its board.

“He has seen an operation much like our scale into a very big business,” said Martin. Klossner’s Backcountry.com is also depends on a working fulfillment center and is based in Utah. “He has just been exactly where we are.”

The space is a crowded one, however. Competitor Chegg operates on a larger scale  and recently acquired CourseRank and Notehall to build out its offerings.

“We’re a completely different animal,” said Martin. “We’re not sitting on $200 million bucks.”

While Chegg has not quite made that much, it is sitting on more rounds of funding than CampusBookRentals.com. Both companies were founded in 2007.

“We’ve kind of had a little bit of a different path,” explained Martin. “We’ve grown up kind of quietly here in northern Utah. We built a business on debt and eventually equity.” And just like a college student would say, “Now, we’re just stoked for the financing.”

For young adults, the best place to flex your entrepreneurial muscle is while you are in college — or at the very least when you are young enough to not be bogged down with a career.

College is a great place to start your venture as you have lots of free time, access to a large pool of human capital and your school can provide much-needed support. The following six points are what I have based my college endeavors around:

One of my main goals as a student entrepreneur was financially bridging the gap between college and the post-college world, better known as “real life”. I made it my goal to find a way to make just enough money on my own to not need a traditional job once I’m out of school.

Once you get a job, starting your own company is much harder. You’re committed to working full-time and it’s easy to become comfortable with a steady salary. I understood the chances of hitting a home run with a successful start up was low, but also that getting a full-time job lowered the chances of ever becoming a successful entrepreneur even more.

In my teens I began creating websites for fun, and eventually turned towards making websites for profit. While the sites were functional and cash flow positive, I knew they would never get big enough to sustain me. I used these ventures successively as springboards to my next idea, gradually creating more complex and successful sites.

I knew that if I kept moving, and kept thinking bigger, I could get to the point where I am today — 22 and the owner of an angel-backed start up. The odds of you hitting it big with your first venture are stacked against you, make sure you have experience running a venture, no matter how small, before you begin investing in a big concept.

Every campus has teachers and other students that you can learn from. Find them. Find the teachers that are willing to help you create your business plan, marketing plan, or set up other introductions. If you’re not technical, network with peers who are. Sell them on your start up idea and offer equity in exchange for their services. Stop by the computer science building and post some fliers about your project. Someone is bound to see it and catch some interest.

In my case I looked for students who saw themselves as entrepreneurs. I didn’t need someone who could do a task, I needed people who were creative and innovative. One of my team members, Andrew Chalmers, was a semi-finalist in a business concept contest for Entrepreneur Magazine, obviously this was someone who has outstanding business talent and I’m excited to have him working with me.

Also, start networking outside of your campus. For example, you could work as a volunteer at a conference in order to get free admission. I did this for the Techcrunch Disrupt conference this past fall and ended up working speaker registration. I got to meet Peter Theil, Gina Bianchini, Kevin Hartz, and many other CEOs of large companies. I doubt they remember me but it was still an awesome experience to say the least! Opportunity is everywhere, go out and find it.

I’ve never really been a fan of business competitions, primarily because of their notorious emphasis on business plans. Your business idea will change so much it’s mind blowing — so much so that writing a business plan could be counter productive.

This year, however, I won first place in the Fall 2010 CSU Chico Business Competition for my current start up, Bizness Apps, which led to my first angel investors. Two teachers involved in the competition were so impressed with my start up that they set up a lunch meeting with my current investors. Take advantage of these opportunities – even if the first place cash prize is only $300 bucks!

You never know who will be in attendance at these events, and at the very least it gives you valuable experience in pitching a concept in a professional setting. By entering business competitions you have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Don’t worry about people stealing your idea – if you don’t win the contest why would a contestant want to steal a losing idea? On the flip side, if you win people will look to you as the person who can pull the concept off.

4. Learn outside of the classroom

Build a library full of business books and read all of them. Learn to read a book in a day or two. Scan through the parts that you’re already familiar with in order to get through the book quickly. I usually aim to read 3-4 books a week. Teach yourself everything you need to know in order to make your start up successful.

Be very selective and know what you are looking to take away from every book. I wanted to focus on effective simplicity, which led me to the book Rework by the founders of 37Signals. When I wanted to learn about the early stages of startup life, I read Founders at Work by Y Combinator founding partner Jessica Livingston, a collection of interviews with largely successful entrepreneurs.

When you set out to acquire knowledge, be sure it’s relevant to your situation.

5. Use your surroundings for business idea inspiration

It only makes sense when setting out on your venture to immerse yourself in something you are knowledgeable and passionate about. In my case I looked towards my obsession with my iPhone, and I began paying attention to how smart phones were changing the way people interacted with businesses.

It wasn’t very long before I realized that there was an enormous opportunity to help the average business owner connect with their clientele on a mobile level. While I knew that a business would love to have a presence in the pocket of their customers at all times, I also wanted there to be a significant value for the person using the app as well. By looking towards my own habits, and that of my peers, I was able to develop a solution that was beneficial to both the business and consumer.

Talk often with your target markets to be sure you’re on the right path. It is so easy to get carried away with an idea that you think is great but offers little to no real value to your clients. It seems obvious, but always pay attention to feedback and structure your decisions around what your environment is telling you.

6.  Just do it

This is probably my biggest piece of advice for college entrepreneurs: just do it! There is no better time in your life to start a company. You have little to no responsibilities, you’re surrounded my people who can help you, and now is the best time in your life to take on risk!

Got a business idea you’ve been bouncing around in your head? Just do it. Don’t wait until tomorrow, next week, or next month. Start building traction today.

In my experience, the biggest hurdle of starting a business is actually doing it. When you start a business, it’s fine not to know everything or even have a ‘solid’ business plan. In fact, most companies deviate significantly from their original plan! These things will fall into place and the things you learn along the way will last a lifetime. To get to this point though, you have to stop planning and start doing.

I’m a huge supporter of the “minimum viable product” business strategy, which advocates to move quickly, get your product out fast, and improve your product with feedback. You shove your product out into the market knowing it has bugs, knowing it could be improved — but you do this to simply start building your business.

By implementing this strategy you are building traction everyday. You stop thinking and you start acting. This is the single biggest step for an entrepreneur. Just do it!

Andrew Gazdecki is the founder and CEO of Bizness Apps, a do-it-yourself iPhone app platform that allows small businesses to easily create, edit, and manage an iPhone app online without any programming knowledge needed. He is 22, attending CSU Chico full time pursuing a Business Marketing degree, and will graduate in the Spring of 2011.

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The service allows students across the world to make and share lecture notes and flashcards around their courses. Students can even team up with classmates, share material, and have the service transcribe their handwritten class notes. A useful feature on the site helps students assess their readiness for exams by generating quizzes based on their notes.

The service operates on a “freemium” payment model. Most features are free to use, but members can elect to upgrade to StudyBlue+, its premium version, for a day ($4.99), month ($9.99), or year ($59.99), to access features such as comparing and combining notes with other users on the site.

Launched in 2008, StudyBlue has expanded from 25 campuses to more than 500 and has over hundreds of thousands students enlisted on its platform. With its newly raised capital, the company plans to expand to more campuses and extend its accessibility across mobile devices.

StudyBlue is based in Madison, Wisconsin, and has raised $2.85 million over the past two years, bringing its total funding to $6.5 million.

Facebook describes the page as a place where students and student organizations can figure out how to best use the site. There’s a “Deals” tab where students can find back-to-school bargains from retailers including Modcloth, Tigerdirect.com, and Alice.com. Facebook says the section was created by Facebook marketing company Context Optional. Other tabs include a “Press” page for student newspapers, a “Student Government” page, a “Sports” page, and a general “Community” page.

Of course, the very existence of a page like this serves as a reminder of how Facebook has changed — where it was once a site designed by and for universities, they are now a specialized audience with a page catering to their specific needs.

Facebook isn’t the only company tying a launch to the new school year. Just last week, we covered the funding of both Scoop and CollegeOnly.