Feature writing

A new service aims to answer college applicants’ pressing questions, especially those not addressed on official tours, by setting up meetings with prospective students and “insider” enrollees at individual schools.

It was during yet another official campus tour while trying to find the right school for her two older children—“in a group of 30, with the backwards-walking guide, and that one mom who’s monopolizing the guide’s attention and no one else can get a word in”—that Jacqueline Biscotti got the idea that germinated into Campuswink.

Campuswink, which went live in March, matches students on college campuses with college-searching students and their parents. In either an online consultation or in-person tour, a “campus insider” who is already at the college gives the would-be student the unfiltered lowdown on life there: no script, no sanitized spin, no large groups inhibiting the posing of questions the would-be student wants answers to, which might encompass the best bars, most raucous dorms, what notes to hit in composing the best college essay, or the state of on-campus parking.

A 30-minute Campuswink video call is $45, a package of three such calls $120, with an in-person campus tour lasting anything up to two hours costing $150. (The guides themselves are paid $33 for the virtual sessions and $100 for the in-person tours.) The service presently has 463 verified guides at 167 universities, with Biscotti ultimately aiming to have guides in all American universities.

Biscotti created and founded the company after she and her husband Larry—who respectively attended the University of Maryland and Cornell—moved from Colorado to Atlanta, Georgia. Campuswink is a site borne not of tech-bro millions or market-tested algorithms, but from the Biscotti family’s personal experience of college-applying that will likely chime with many parents and their kids.

“When it came to choosing schools for our two eldest, Jackson and Mia, they wanted to embrace Greek life, and we realized we didn’t know anyone,” Biscotti tells T&C. “I thought, ‘There should be a way for kids who don’t have existing networks to connect with college students and find out stuff not covered by conventional tours.’ You can watch as many TikToks as you like, but you can’t ask the questions you really want to ask.”

The Campuswink website features not only a range of guides at different campuses but user-friendly filters around certain subjects like fraternities and sororities, religion, working out, and LGBT life. There have been no objections from colleges thus far. “Our student guides love their schools, they’re just not sugar-coating things,” says Biscotti.

Campuswink has found a distinct niche in what has become a crowded, dollar-drenched marketplace of high-school students and their families hawkishly hunting college places. There are libraries full of detailed annual college guides, while “rock star” independent college admissions counselors are part of a $3 billion industry all their own—to say nothing of the TikToks, social media “experts,” and marketing videos of the colleges themselves aiming to sway hearts and minds. Campuswink hopes to ace them all by majoring on the exchange of student-on-student real-talk.

“We think a wink represents a subtle trusted transfer of knowledge and shared understanding,” Biscotti says of the site’s name. “We wanted to convey: we’ve got the insider information from the people in the know.”

Grayson Richmond, a third-year mechanical engineering student at Clemson University, SC, tells T&C that it “feels really open, sharing my experiences and speaking my mind” as a Campuswink guide. “I get a lot of questions about nightlife, professors, the dorms that are the most fun to live in, and whether I have thought about switching schools. In person, it feels more in-depth. The student and family feel at liberty to ask me anything, and I feel at liberty to tell them about all the highs and lows.”

Biscotti says safeguards are in place to ensure that students’ privacy and safety are not compromised, though she concedes that Campuswink cannot stop students and would-be students exchanging personal information. She hopes the inter-student communication is helpful for the young people’s social skills, especially for a generation so typically head-buried in their devices.

From would-be students, Biscotti says, the most-asked questions are: “What do you wish you’d have known about this school?,” “Would you still come here if you could choose again?,” “How did you find ‘your people?’” (i.e. friendship group), and “Is it hard to get the classes you need to graduate, and can you graduate on time?” Specific Greek life-related questions revolve around what to wear and social media use. Also: “If I don’t join a fraternity or sorority, will I still have fun?” Biscotti laughed. “The answer to that is a resounding ‘Yes.’”

When John Jakovenko took his 17-year-old daughter Emma to check out Florida State University (his alma mater and where she is hoping to study), he found the official tour “more geared towards parents than the students,” he tells T&C. “The Campuswink tour was a thousand times better. It was geared towards what my daughter wanted to know, which is what I wanted too—for her to hear about the real experience of going to FSU from another student living it.”

Biscotti’s older kids are now Campuswink guides too: Jackson, 21, is a rising senior at the University of Alabama, while Mia, 19, is a rising junior at Auburn University. (Their third child, Joseph, 17, is about to embark on the college application process; for Lorenzo, 14, it’s all still a little way off.)

As Campuswink establishes a presence, Biscotti does not want to partner with colleges. “We want to stay un-official, we want to be authentic and real. If colleges reach out to ask, ‘What are students saying about us?’ they can take whatever information we have and make the good things better, or work on the things students say they have an issue with.”

For Jakovenko, it was the student-to-student communication of Campuswink that proved key. “For teenagers it’s sometimes not easy to meet new people, but this was another young person which made the whole thing easier and more relaxing. If it wasn’t for Campus Wink I’m not sure Emma would have been as excited by the idea of going to FSU as she is now.”