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The mission of Mapt is to provide every high school family equal access to the tools necessary to optimize students' higher education paths. We don’t just want to help students get into college; we want to help them get into the right college and succeed in life. By 2026, we aim to build an entirely software-based tool that provides the same education planning support a human consultant gives their clients today.
We’re all aware of the challenges that are rapidly evolving into crises today. The solution to every crisis we face has one commonality: a need for educated people to apply their knowledge and skills to find solutions. We won’t solve climate change without first educating the next generation of engineers; we won’t solve the housing crisis without educating the next generation of architects and builders; we won’t solve food shortages without educating the next generation of biologists and farmers. We can’t protect our democracy without an educated electorate. Therefore, our vision isn’t solely to help improve individuals lives, but also society as a whole. We aim to make the world a better place, one productive, educated, happy person at a time.
The admissions consulting marketplace is polarized. On one extreme, overworked public school counselors, on average, get 15 minutes to talk to a student about college planning. On the other hand, private college admissions consultants charge high-income families thousand of dollars per year to guarantee admission to Ivy League universities. These two forces leave a massive demand for education planning support in the middle and bottom of the market.
Mapt sits in between these two extremes and serves as a rational voice for families. We build Mapt with the families in mind who can't pay $250/hour for an education consultant. We built it for the students AND parents to get honest and straightforward college planning support. Using a SaaS subscription model, modern product design, and AI, Mapt costs a fraction of what consultants charge and achieves much of the same value. We estimate roughly 15 million U.S. families don’t have access to professional college planning support. By 2026, we aim to build an entirely software-based tool that provides the same education planning support a human consultant gives their clients today.
There’s an emerging trend of people questioning the overall benefits of a college education. Their common rebuttal to pursuing college is the rising costs of tuition don’t justify the economic return after graduation. Others raise concerns that college doesn’t prepare you for a productive career. Both of these perspectives are justified critiques, and families that ignore them are making a mistake. We also believe that college institutions and administrators who don’t work to improve this should be held accountable.
We’d also be the first to concede that if you don’t financially plan for college it might not be worth it. But the failure of this argument is that it leads to behavior akin to “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” People disregard college entirely, instead of doing the work to make sound financial plans like applying FAFSA, scholarships, or attending a school with a strong financial fit. It's worth noting, this behavior is completely understandable because planning for college is hard. Consider that 90% of FAFSA applications are filled out incorrectly, $100 million in scholarships and $2 billion in grants go unclaimed each year, and students may need to write as many as 20 college application essays during their senior year.
Financial
Those with a college degree:
The economic positives are clear—if you can financially plan for college and graduate without large student loans, you put yourself in an exciting financial position for life. Students from families with income in the top 20% have a 60% rate of graduating college, compared to students in the bottom quintile with 16% of graduating college.
Health
Health outcomes are also drastically impacted by continuing education.
The health outcomes associated with education rates make sense when you think about the economic impacts of graduating college, as well as the literacy and critical thinking skills needed to navigate the complexities of the U.S. health insurance industry.
Civic Engagement
Regardless of your political beliefs, we all agree that higher civic engagement and voter turnout create a healthier and just society.
Political Narratives vs. Reality
A Pew Research study in 2021 showed that the majority of graduates said their college education was extremely or very useful when it came to helping them grow personally and intellectually (79%), opening doors to job opportunities (70%) and developing specific skills and knowledge that could be used in the workplace (65%).
