Improved Version of U-CAN Launched, Participation Continues to Grow

We are pleased to announce the unveiling of U-CAN "2.0" this morning. The site features two major upgrades: a greatly enhanced search function, increasing the number of searchable variables from three to 17; and a new consumer guide to help families plan for college, search for the best college fit, and navigate the financial aid maze.

The launch of U-CAN 2.0 was recently reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed and an item on the launch appears in the Life section of today's USA Today (page 4D, not available on line).

The enhancements featured in U-CAN 2.0 are driven by findings from a series of consumer focus groups conducted by NAICU in late spring 2008, and from feedback gathered from U-CAN site visitors.

This first major upgrade to U-CAN comes nearly a year after the site was originally launched. Over the past 12 months, U-CAN has experienced a 21-percent increase in campus participation, from 600 to 728 institutions. More than 400,000 users have visited the site, viewing more than a million pages.

The site has been lauded as an important step forward in college transparency by some of higher education's most adamant critics, and praised for its consumer-friendly data, design, and its links to campus Web sites.

In the past year, U-CAN has been covered in more than 100 news stories, including articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and many other publications. NAICU is currently conducting a media tour, consisting of one-on-one and small group meetings with journalists from national and trade outlets, to promote U-CAN.

Today, in conjunction with the site re-launch, we will initiate a comprehensive Web marketing plan to drive prospective students and their families to the site. Text ads will be featured on relevant Google keyword search result pages, ads will appear on the Web pages of contextually related news stories, and display ads will target high school students on Facebook. We will follow up with direct mailings to members of the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the Independent Educational Counselors Association later this month, and with advertising in NACAC print and online publications.

If you are a participating institution, we encourage you to use the re-launch as an opportunity to promote your institution's involvement in this important consumer initiative to local media, alumni, and other campus constituencies. You can find an updated U-CAN campus communications outreach toolkit -- with talking points, background on the initiative, sample promotional tools, and other resources -- on the NAICU Web site.

To date, more than 70 percent of NAICU members have joined U-CAN. We have set a goal of 100 percent participation by our institutions. If your college has yet to join U-CAN (or has not yet completed the recent data update), we strongly encourage you to do so. You can sign up by using our simple online form. The U-CAN site also lists institutions that have signed up, but have not yet published their U-CAN profile or updated their data. Please double-check the list to make sure that your institution is not among those whose profiles are not updated. Thank you for your commitment to U-CAN.