Part 2: Applying online, touring online and the future

Do you foresee a time when all college applications and data will be primarily collected via the Internet?
That time is now! Many of our serious customers already receive the majority of their applications online, and some are considering receiving it only that way, and discontinuing paper applications due to the time and cost savings electronic applications provide. In fact, some of our customers now exceed 80%!

Your site is rich in multimedia elements, yet it is one of the few sites in which the use of multimedia complements the usability aims of the site. Can you tell us more about your tours?
Multi-media tours permit students to "visit" campuses online and learn about several aspects of each campus. Each campus tour contains the following generic sections in addition to specialized information submitted by each campus.

• Quick facts and pictures
• General
• Student body
• Majors and degrees
• Student life
• Athletics
• Student services
• Admissions
• Financial information
• Transfers and international students

As a time saving aid to students, the format and layout of campus tours throughout all of Xap's systems have been made the same.

Is the data for the campus tours difficult to maintain and update?
Campus tours are not difficult to maintain, because Mentor systems are data driven, and it is each participating college's responsibility to maintain and update their data. In that way, not only does the maintenance get distributed among Xap's clients, Xap's Mentor systems have the most current and up to date information and data.

How do you maintain and protect the confidentiality of the information you collect?
Xap Corporation strictly adheres to all State and Federal privacy laws. Simply stated, student data belongs only to students and is not provided to any third parties whatsoever, including educational institutions, without the expressed consent of the student.

What do you see as the future challenge in the ever-changing world of client- server architecture?
The future challenge is interconnectivity and data re-use. Every student, every high school and every college in the United States will eventually be connected through a distributed network. Xap, in working with individual states and the U.S. Department of Education, hopes to play a major role in this national distributed database capability.

Xap has been a pioneer in this area as evidenced a couple of years ago when the Department of Education entrusted Xap to transfer student information from our database to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) at the request of the student.

We are currently working on projects that transfer other sensitive information between students, high schools and colleges and will ultimately result in enormous cost and time savings as well as convenience for all parties involved.