College.gov Unveiled by Department of Education

The U.S. Department of Education, in a press release, just announced the release of their new website college.gov.  The press release describes it as:

a new website that aims to motivate students with inspirational stories and information about planning, preparing and paying for college.

Cute.  It sounds comprehensive, but the site itself is actually shallow.  Within 30 minutes you’ve seen all there is to see.  Couple student interviews, couple more quotes, that most certainly feel staged, and some walk-throughs that only begin to explore the stress inducing process that is applying to college.  It’s all stuff the private sector has done before though, and all stuff one can find on collegeboard.com or from a simple google search.  The feds are a bit late to hop on this bandwagon.

Perhaps it is more heartening, in this day and age, to see this information coming from the government now.  The site design is great, in my opinion.  Simple, with a wide scope, but not too deep that one can get lost.

The thing is, it’s only worth it if people start using it.  And I’m not sure that I’d switch from using Collegeboard’s site, where I have to be anyway to register for testing, to use this one if I was in the heart of the college application process again.  Compete.com doesn’t have data availiable for the site yet, so I’m not sure how popular it was upon release.  We’ll have to wait and see, but hopefully the government’s time and money did not go to waste.