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.
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.
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.