study-abroad
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A Minnesota College Made Curiosity a Spectator Sport
Gustavus is small by design, but its ambitions spill well beyond the classroom. The wager is that close mentorship, a guaranteed real-world experience, and one unusually public science conference can make a 1,900-student college feel larger than its headcount.
The Liberal-Arts College That Turned a Hill Into a Launchpad
St. Olaf's product is not simply a degree. It is a carefully wired four-year network of classrooms, choirs, mentors, global programs and career experiments - built to make a small college feel bigger than its map.
Union College
The little college in Schenectady that put engineering inside the liberal arts, minted a president, and never stopped calling itself Union.
Studyportals
Studyportals is a Netherlands-based education platform that helps students discover and compare study programs anywhere in the world. Through nine portals - including Mastersportal, Bachelorsportal, PhDportal and Scholarshipportal - it lists more than 240,000 English-taught programs from over 3,500 institutions across 110+ countries, drawing roughly 50 million student visitors a year. For universities, it turns that global demand data into recruitment, analytics and consulting services, and in 2024 it launched an AI Student Advisor named Sophia, built with AWS, to guide applicants in more than 20 languages.
uhomes.com
uhomes.com (operated by Uhouzz) is a global online marketplace for international student accommodation. Founded in 2015 by Jason Yin, it connects students with verified housing near universities across 500+ cities in around 27 countries, listing more than 2 million beds from 2,000+ apartment brands. The platform combines AI-driven property matching, VR and 3D virtual viewings, multilingual one-on-one consultants and a zero-agency-fee, zero-markup pricing promise, and has served over 2.5 million registered users with 400,000+ successful bookings.
Edwin van Rest
Edwin van Rest is the co-founder and CEO of Studyportals, the Eindhoven-based platform that helps students compare study programs across borders. He started the company in 2007 with two engineering friends after his own year abroad in Japan showed him how hard it was to find information about international study options. Today Studyportals lists hundreds of thousands of programs, reaches millions of students a month, and van Rest is a recognized voice in international education, a former EAIE Rising Star Award winner, and chair of the EAIE Marketing & Recruitment Expert Community.
Jason Yin
Jason Yin (Yin Jiankun) is the founder and CEO of uhomes.com (formerly Uhouzz), a global online marketplace for international student accommodation. After more than a decade teaching and leading at New Oriental Education & Technology Group, he launched the platform in March 2015 to help students studying overseas find, tour and book housing. Today uhomes.com lists more than two million beds across 500-plus cities and roughly 2,000 universities, operates from around 16 global offices, and carries a 4.9-star Trustpilot rating, positioning itself as one of the largest student housing booking platforms in the world.
CL Global Academy
CL Global Academy is an independent international education company that runs academically rigorous, project-based short courses in the heart of Cambridge, UK. Founded in 2009 by Allen Hao and Katrina, it hosts residential programmes inside historic Cambridge colleges - taught by University of Cambridge-affiliated lecturers - covering fields from AI and data science to innovation and entrepreneurship. The Academy welcomes over 1,500 students a year and counts more than 24,000 alumni across 16 years, having grown into a multi-million-dollar business without institutional venture funding.
LinguaTrip
LinguaTrip is a Silicon Valley-based edtech company that helps people around the world learn English and study abroad. What began in 2015 as a marketplace for booking language-immersion trips grew into an online platform for English courses, TOEFL and IELTS exam prep, university enrollment help, and visa support. Co-founded by YouTube creator Marina Mogilko - whose linguamarina channel has millions of subscribers - LinguaTrip pairs its courses with a massive free content engine, and says it has served 160,000+ students across 25+ countries.
PalmDrive, Inc.
PalmDrive (棕榈大道) is an education-technology company that connects students - mostly Chinese students aiming for top overseas universities - with a network of thousands of mentors who have themselves attended those schools. Founded by Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard alumni in 2013, PalmDrive pairs one-on-one mentorship in admissions, cultural integration, and career planning with an online platform that has drawn a community of more than a million students. The company operates across China and Silicon Valley and has raised over US$10 million in venture funding.
Greg Shrader
Greg Shrader is the founder and CEO of Wellspring International Education, a Colorado-based firm that connects international students with U.S. colleges and universities. A learning scientist by training who has worked in higher education since 1999, he built Wellspring from a start-up into one of the leading higher-education marketing and recruitment organizations through a string of mergers and acquisitions, including the 2022 purchase of Australian platform StudyMe. He also leads Wellspring Higher Education and its teacher-education brand, NTEC.
Allen Hao
Allen Hao is the founder and CEO of CL Global Academy, an international education company he co-founded in 2009 with Katrina Hao after the two met in Cambridge. From offices in the UK, Shanghai, and the US, the academy runs its 'OxCam Programmes' - short, project-based academic courses taught in Cambridge colleges by University-affiliated faculty. Hao has called himself an entrepreneur since age 16 and built the company without external funding into a profitable business serving over 1,500 students a year, with a claimed 24,000-plus alumni. Internally he goes by the title 'Chief Student-Centered Officer.' Born in Shanghai and splitting time between Cambridge and Madison, Wisconsin, he completed a Master's at the University of Cambridge from 2023 to 2025.
Dmitrii Pistolyako
Dmitrii Pistolyako is the co-founder and CEO of LinguaTrip, a San Francisco-based booking platform for language courses and study-abroad programs that has served more than 100,000 students from over 100 countries. A math-and-economics graduate from Saint Petersburg, he turned a free study-abroad consulting side hustle into a venture-backed company, surviving more than 50 investor rejections before becoming the only Russian startup in his 500 Startups batch. He also leads Fluent.Express and shares his playbook for building a company in the US through his Russian-language YouTube channel and online courses.
Khadeejah Nauman
Khadeejah Nauman is a Karachi-based education professional working as an Executive Associate at ExxelTNR, a higher education consultancy that guides Pakistani students through studying abroad - from admissions and visas to landing in a new country. Trained as a psychologist at Istanbul Bilgi University, she pairs a counselor's read of people with the logistics of moving lives across borders.
Crimson Education
Crimson Education is a New Zealand-founded edtech company that helps ambitious students win places at the world's most selective universities - the Ivy League, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford and beyond. Through a mix of data, AI tools and a global network of roughly 3,000 tutors and former admissions officers, it offers admissions consulting, tutoring, extracurricular mentoring and its own accredited online high school, Crimson Global Academy. Founded in 2013, it became Australasia's first edtech unicorn in November 2024 at a NZ$1 billion valuation.
Embark Corporation
Embark Corporation is a New York-based education technology company that has built online application and admissions software since 1995. Its flagship platform, Embark Campus, runs the full admissions lifecycle - recruiting, applications, review, decisions, enrollment and data integration - for colleges, universities, fellowships and scholarship programs. Embark says its software has powered more than 16 million student applications for institutions including Harvard, NYU, Stanford and the Rhodes and Fulbright fellowships.