GradeFund: "Get Paid for Good Grades."

Students invite their friends and family to sponsor their drive for good grades. Sponsors choose grade levels and sponsorship amounts for each grade (as low as $5). Each semester students upload their transcript. We verify grades, collect money from sponsors, and send it to schools or students depending on sponsor preferences. For individuals or companies that want to create an educational cause, they select the classes and grade levels at the universities they want to sponsor. We send the money to the eligible students who achieve the target performance levels.

 

Our Values

1. Students should be rewarded for academic excellence.
2. A great education should be available to all of the world's students.
3. Educational resources should be deployed as efficiently as possible.
4. The world needs to be better able to find the talent it needs to solve important problems.

 

Our Mission

Our goal is to be the most important resource for students across the world to get a great education. We want students to have a friend who works tirelessly to help make a great education more affordable and more accessible. The GradeFund has also been designed to help students find jobs and internships easier as they contemplate life after school. We have taken the first small steps of a long journey to help students across the world achieve a higher level of education.

 

Michael & Matthew Kopko: The site has been designed and built by the Kopko brothers, Michael and Matthew. Michael graduated with Honors from Harvard in 2007 and was offered the Feldberg Fellowship, a full-tuition scholarship paid for by Henry Kravis, to attend Columbia’s Business School (Class of 2009). Matthew graduated from Princeton in 2008 and currently attends the Law School at the University of Chicago. Majoring in economics, he also studied engineering and econometrics at Princeton and wrote his thesis under the direct guidance of Nobel Prize selection committee economist Per Krusell. Michael and Matthew founded DormAid in 2003 while Michael was a freshman at Harvard.

 

DormAid: Excluding the Kopkos, DormAid currently has 3 full time employees. The company also has 30+ part time employees who serve as campus Presidents at their schools. The DormAid Team has spent considerable time building channels of access to administrators and friends at college campuses across the country.

 

ThoughtBot: Led by Chad Pytel, ThoughtBot is a team of 13 who specialize in Ruby and web applications. The first iteration build took approximately 6 weeks with a sub-team of 4 professional programmers. Both companies are excited to reinvest in development.

 

Henry Jones: Henry Jones is a free lance designer from Tennessee who has been helping build the image of the GradeFund since July, 2008. He is currently helping design marketing and informational materials as the sales and marketing programs are executed.
 

Please contact beck@gradefund.com for our executive summary and slide deck. 

Key points:

-Percentage of Gross Transfers

-Fees for employers / businesses to propositioning students

-Working capital benefit

-GradeFund Database value

 

Confidential and privileged. Please contact beck@gradefund.com for our executive summary and slide deck. 

There are over 79 million students in the United States, and over 20 million are in college or graduate school. Overall, the United States spends about $1 trillion dollars on education, $373 billion at the college and university level. What's more, the cost of college tuition has gone up over 60% in the last 2 decades. Average yearly tuition per student is over $15,000.

 

Due to the size of the educational field, there is no lack of people in the space. From loan to grants to scholarships, students are provided with lots of sources of funding for college. However, each alternative has its own drawbacks, and none hold the promise of value to users outside of school financing.

 

At around $80 billion per year, the student loan market is huge. Students are offered a variety of federally-funded and private loans for education. The obvious problem with loans is that they have to be repaid. Many students have to get jobs to make their interest payments. What's more, they are indebted to paying back the principal for years after graduation. Three in four full-time undergraduates receive financial aid of some kind, and two in three (65.7%) of them graduate with debt. The average student loan debt among graduating seniors is $19,237. Graduating college with mounting debt is a serious disincentive for students to pursue graduate degrees.
Scholarships remove the pains of being indebted, but they too are problematic. Federal financial aid and work-study programs often require students receiving aid to take a job which is often demeaning and distracts students from valuable studying time. Scholarships are often very limited in what types of applicants they accept, requiring minority status or certain characteristics of the student's background to be considered. The space is also very unorganized and offers little return for effort, as each grant requires filling out a customized application to even be considered.
Even marginally creative educational financing services like GreenNote™1, which enable "peer-to-peer" lending for education, are hitting significant hurdles. What's more, the future of these companies is in question because of recent moves by the SEC to regulate peer-to-peer lending.2

 

The GradeFund solves the problems of debt, multiple applications, and regulatory oversight. Additionally, no competitor offers additional benefits like employment opportunities and no competitor maintains such a valuable performance database like the GradeFund plans to do. With the GradeFund, the potential for a debt-free education dependent academic performance will connect students with their networks and a host of organizational sponsors.
 

Please contact beck@gradefund.com for our executive summary and slide deck.