Vireo Labs, a career-focused education technology company, today announced the release of C’reer – a free mobile app that matches students with career fields and connects them with the best performing college programs in those fields via real-time chat.
“Research on college is a search for a career path,” said Jose Mallabo, co-founder and chief executive officer of Vireo Labs. “In our years in higher education we have seen students are essentially trying to answer the question ‘What do I want to be when I grow up?’ when looking at college options. And, they’re doing it increasingly on mobile devices not desktops.”
C’reer is available now for free in the App Store for iOS devices or in Google Play for Android devices.
Vireo Labs pointed to the following trends as drivers for C’reer:
- 80 percent of teens use a mobile device to visit a college (source: Chegg), but only half of all colleges in the United States have a mobile responsive website (source: Noel Levitz)
- 86 percent of mobile usage is app based (source: Flurry Analytics)
- 18.6 million undergraduate students are expected to attend college in fall 2017 – up from 13.1 million in 2000 (source: National Center for Education Statistics); and
- 4-year private colleges spend a median $2,433 to recruit a single student (source: Noel Levitz)
“C’reer is free and will always be free to students, families and high schools,” Mallabo added. “The U.S. is on track to fall 23 million college degrees short of meeting the demands of the job market so providing access to research tools like this to anyone is the only way to make a dent in that massive gap. Researching careers and a college education should be a function of interest, not money to pay for expensive subscriptions.”
Vireo Labs has established scholarships with UrbanSTEM Academy and iFoster, non-profit organizations dedicated to providing STEM education and services to students in inner cities and foster youth, respectively. The company also recruited the 2016 School Counselor of the Year Katherine Pastor to its board of advisors.
C’reer key features include:
- Unique and dynamic vocational assessment created and tested by the top research scientists in the field ensures the same accuracy as 400-item assessments at no cost.
- Career matchmaking algorithm that pairs vocational profiles with multiple career options from a database of more than 60,000 job titles.
- College program recommendations engine that identifies the best program matches for the user based on performance in placing alumni in a selected career field. C’reer pulls from every type of college: two-year, community college, four-year, private, public and vocational technology.
- Real-time chat with an admissions representative at a college program C’reer has matched to one of the student’s career interests. C’reer users simply click the chat button to notify a college they would like to have a dialogue.
C’reer has already seen more than 2,200 downloads from users in 20 states.
- More than half of C’reer users have returned social, investigative or artistic as their primary personality types; and
- Students have requested to chat with a wide range of schools nationwide, including MIT, Georgia Tech, University of California, Berkeley, Fresno Pacific University, Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, Arcadia University, Boston College, Texas Christian University, Johnston Community College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Yale, to name a few.
C’reer on Indiegogo
A future version of C’reer will include an experience built to help the 500,000 foster children in the U.S. find their way to a career path, apprenticeship or college program. The company has launched a crowd funding campaign on Indiegogo to raise capital to help with development costs. Visit the C’reer campaign at https://igg.me/at/creer-foster-youth.
About Vireo Labs
Vireo Labs is a career focused education technology company based in Beaufort, South Carolina. The founding team is leveraging its higher education and ecommerce experience from eBay and Amazon into the development of its first mobile product, C’reer. For more information about the company visit www.vireolabs.co or sign up for product updates at www.creer.us.
