Creating A College and University Ecosystem – October 2015

Creating A College and University Ecosystem
Founder Anirudh Motwani talks about his startup, India College Search, which is an education portal whose award-winning algorithm sorts colleges on a variety of quantitative and qualitative factors to provide a student with the most relevant results

Can you give us a brief idea of how India College Search works?
IndiaCollegeSearch (rebranded CollegeSearch.in from Oct 1) provides in depth information including faculty, placement, facilities, fees and alumni reviews that allow a student choose from among thousands of options open to them. We also aim to improve the application process by allowing students to apply directly to the college. Currently, 3000+colleges and universities accept online applications via IndiaCollegeSearch.

What is the most popular course that gets searched on the site and has there been a significant change in popular course options in the past 5 years or so?
Since we started with engineering back in 2010, it continues to be the most popular course on our site and otherwise, with over 5 lakh students enrolling for the course every year. Certain changes have taken place over the past years, with professional courses like MBBS & BBA gaining in popularity at the undergraduate level while degree courses such as BA & BSc reducing in percentage terms although they still account for greater admissions in absolute terms.
The research in job market has also meant a polarisation post-grad courses, especially for MBA, where the lack of quality institues has meant that admissions are dropping despite a high interest.

How do you ensure that India College Search stands out amongst all the already existing ventures in the industry?
By ensuring we do not work on a classifieds model with colleges, we have been able to create the largest college and university ecosystem. Over 6000 institutes IndiaCollegeSearch (more than 10X of any other platform). In terms of quality too, we are the only ones to work with the best institutes in each field including NIFT for fashion, School of Planning & Architecture for architecture, NALSAR for law, NITs for engineering, Jesus & Mary College (JMC), Ferguson & Loyola for degree courses and XLRI, Narsee Monjee & MDI for management.

What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs out there who wish to begin their own start ups?
Create a product or service to solve a problem rather than trying to find problems that can be solved by the business you want to create; ii)Try to focus on problems which you have faced personally since this will put you in a unique position to solve it and make decision making instinctive

How big is your team?
24

If you were to describe India College Search in one phrase, what would it be?
College Selection & Admission Platform

If you were to describe start ups in India in one word, what would it be?
“Me-too”