When we think about a high touch, high value employee benefit like College Coach we often focus on the end user: the employee who is the beneficiary of the service. People say 'Wow, that's so nice!' when I tell them we have 100 corporate partners who offer the benefit to their employees. While most employees would agree that it IS nice to have access to such a great benefit, that's not really why the service has gained traction over the years. Savvy employers know that talent is difficult to find and retain, and that employee loyalty really matters. They also understand that if they remove major distractors, like the college admissions process, then employees will be more productive at work.

Hours of College Finance Research, Ill-Fated Results

For example: employees can spend hours of time trying to figure out how to move money around to hide assets from the financial aid office. Doing so can sometimes artificially inflate parents' income in the form of capital gains. This income can cost them much more in financial aid than the original assets did! Employees can also spend hours of time online on legitimate and illegitimate websites trying to track down scholarships for their child, and they often come up empty-handed. We can tell them in a matter of minutes that parental assets have very little effect on financial aid eligibility and there's often no need to move money. Our college finance experts can quickly point to the most helpful scholarship resources and advise them on which colleges will likely to provide funding for their child. Similarly, there are countless opinions floating around on what matters to admissions officers and how to game the admissions process. It can take hours to try to figure out what is true and what is (often incorrect) opinion.

Maximize Time Spent on College Admissions

Recently we worked with one employee who was trying to determine what colleges to visit and when, and then how to maximize those visits. With her College Coach-customized college list in hand and a few key questions answered by our experts, she was able to plan how to target particular schools and learn as much as possible while on the campuses, minimizing time away from the office.

The Numbers: Employee Productivity & the College Coach Benefit

In one financial services firm we found that, over the course of one year, 602 employees visited the College Coach portal. They reported the following: "We also learned that for every touch with College Coach, employees felt they saved 4.5 hours they would have spent getting the same information in another way." When we looked conservatively at time spent, we can confidently say that we saved this financial services partner 2600 hours of lost productivity in one year, which, when multiplied by the average salary for this employer, resulted in a productivity gain of $176,000. I think most employers would agree that that kind of annual employee productivity gain is way more than nice.