Peterson's Online College Help

Online help for kids considering college. The publisher of the well-known Peterson's College Guides has launched a free service on the web to help high school students find and apply to the right colleges and universities. Stephen Smith is the director of collegequest.com. It's sort of a one stop shop that can save a lot of time...

"The most important aspect is that we've taken all the information and put it in one place. So that rather than having to go from one site to another and repeat data entry, you can come to CollegeQuest, you can enter information once. The information that you enter in an area we call the personal files will feed into your college applications, it will feed into your scholarship search."

And more and more schools are accepting applications right
over the Internet. The information for each student is saved in a password protected area on CollegeQuest. Smith says Peterson's is expecting many students to take advantage of the service...

"We estimate that in our market, approximately 49 percent have access to the web, either at home or in school, and so we think that we're going to see some really tremendous usage. The market itself is about 3.6 million seniors every year who face the challenge of determining whether they want to go to college and going through the application process."

The site also includes a database of some 800 thousand available scholarships and there's information on loans.