# Niche

> Niche is a Pittsburgh-based education discovery and enrollment platform. Families use its free school profiles, rankings, reviews, scholarship tools and direct admissions offers; institutions pay for recruitment, advertising, analytics and communications products. Its roots are in College Prowler, the student-written guidebook business launched in 2002.

- **Founded:** 2002
- **Headquarters:** Pittsburgh, United States
- **Founders:** Luke Skurman (Co-founder and CEO), Joey Rahimi (Co-founder), Christina Koshzow (Co-founder)
- **Products:** School and college discovery, K-12 rankings and profiles, Places to Live, Niche Direct Admissions, Institutional marketing services
- **Notable:** Niche Direct Admissions was included in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2024., Niche reported 1.19 million students receiving at least one acceptance and scholarship offer in its fall 2026 admissions cohort., Its August 2026 release estimated $254 million in first-year net tuition revenue sourced for participating colleges; this is institutional revenue attributed to the program, not Niche’s revenue.

## Products & services

- **School and college discovery** — Free profiles, student and parent reviews, grades, rankings, comparison tools, college quizzes and scholarship search covering preschool through graduate education.
- **K-12 rankings and profiles** — Public and private school and school-district discovery and comparison; expanded from the college business in 2013.
- **Places to Live** — Neighborhood, city and town profiles and rankings that combine resident feedback with location data.
- **Niche Direct Admissions** — Participating institutions make non-binding acceptance and scholarship offers using eligible high school seniors’ Niche profiles; first pilots ran in 2022.
- **Institutional marketing services** — Premium profiles, sponsored listings, digital advertising, prospect recruitment and reporting for schools and colleges.
- **Niche Market Intelligence** — Inquiry and stated-interest data to help colleges assess markets, competitors and recruitment opportunities.
- **Niche Engage** — Education communications software including personalized video, SMS, AI chatbots and WhatsApp automation; incorporates capabilities associated with the Goodkind acquisition.
- **Data licensing** — School and neighborhood grades, rankings, statistics and other data for education, real estate, research and business applications.

## Achievements

- Niche Direct Admissions was included in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2024.
- Niche reported 1.19 million students receiving at least one acceptance and scholarship offer in its fall 2026 admissions cohort.
- Its August 2026 release estimated $254 million in first-year net tuition revenue sourced for participating colleges; this is institutional revenue attributed to the program, not Niche’s revenue.
- Released 2027 college rankings evaluating more than 4,000 U.S. colleges and universities in August 2026.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — Released 2027 K-12 rankings with separate public/private lists for several categories, state-level assessment data and a new private-school accreditation factor.
- **2026-08** — Released 2027 college rankings with a mission-based Institutional Success Score and pilot Student Wellness and Future Readiness grades.
- **2026-08** — Launched the 2026-27 direct admissions cycle with over 155 institutions; a later August 21 article reported more than 160.
- **2025-01** — Acquired student communications platform Goodkind; acquisition price was not disclosed in the announcement.

## Links

- Website: https://www.niche.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nichesocial/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/nicheSocial
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Nichesocial
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nichesocial/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nichesocial
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nichesocial

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/niche
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-15