STUDENT-TO-STUDENT INFRASTRUCTURE: Anonymous, Responsible Forum for Improving America's Colleges

Indianapolis (April 19, 2000) - Wired college dorms are becoming the norm. And students are America's most Internet-savvy group. Ironically, though, there's one area
where college students could make better use of the Internet: figuring out how to improve their schools.

That's what StudentViewpoints.org is hoping to change. The non-commercial online student community site launches its
interactive "student-to-student" (s2s) network tomorrow. College types -- traditional and non-traditional students,
administrators, and future scholars in high schools everywhere -- are already taking note.

"Until now, prospective and current students haven't been able to get together and decide how to make things better,"
explained StudentViewpoints coordinator Robin Arvin. "We see ourselves as facilitators: we're putting an anonymous
infrastructure out there to empower students and student groups to work together responsible and securely. For them, and for campus administrators, the end result is going to be campus improvement."

That doesn't mean the site is above a little encouragement. StudentViewpoints is a community infrastructure -- it works
best with a critical mass of people populating its community. So StudentViewpoints is staging ten monthly cash drawings of $100, and drawings for $1000 each six months, to be awarded to student panelists.

But at the heart of the online community platform are its online fora, where students can sound off publicly about
everything from their favorite faculty members or social experiences to the courses or residence halls they've hated
the most.

For current students, it's a valuable resource for making informed choice -- and, for their administrators, a way to tap into honest information that can help them make things better. Prospective students making their college choices may find the service even more valuable, because StudentViewpoints can finally help them get a sense of what's really going on.

In addition to the online discussions, the StudentViewpoints platform synthesizes and aggregates the information to generate summary statistics -- like comparative rankings -- and an array of on-line tools and processes to help schools interpret and use the numbers.

For more information on the StudentViewpoints discussion, statistics, and services, please visit http://www.studentviewpoints.org, or contact:

Robin Arvin
tel: 317-972-9468
e-mail: webmaster@studentviewpoints.org



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