Students.gov — Focusing on Students
By Lynda Folwick
U.S. Department of Education

What do college students want from the government? Mostly, they tell us, they want financial aid to help pay for school. And that’s about it – until they find out what is available to them in one place at students.gov. This site is an interagency web site sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education.

The "aha" moment is our goal – the moment when a student realizes that they can not only apply for financial aid online, but can also find hundreds of great internship opportunities, find help with their academic studies and research, search for scholarships (Department of Education) and learn about scholarship scams (Federal Trade Commission), print out a passport application and instructions (Department of State), change their address online (U.S. Postal Service), file taxes online (Internal Revenue Service), register to vote (Federal Election Commission), get advice on renting their first apartment (Department of Housing and Urban Development), check overseas travel advisories and warnings (Department of State), get consumer information (General Services Administration), even reserve a campsite in a national park (National Park Service). And that’s just the beginning!

When we started building students.gov, we found that federal agencies were doing a great job putting information and services online for students. Unfortunately, students did not always know it was there. That’s where the students.gov portal comes in. We’re student-centric, not agency-centric. Based on what students have told us they need, we have created eight main interest categories, like "Plan your Education," "Pay for your Education," and "Career Development," and populated them with a total of 51 related subcategories.

This means that a medical student looking for student loans, for example, does not have to know that Health Professions Student Loans are administered by the Department of Health and Human Services, while Federal Family Education Loans are administered by the Department of Education. Instead, the student can just go to one place and find out about all types of federal student loans.

This works because students.gov was built around students’ needs and life events. We know this because we asked them -- and we are still asking.

  • Student associations: Several national student associations were part of the development team and gave valuable input in the early development stages of the site.
  • Student focus groups: We have conducted several rounds of focus groups to solicit feedback and make sure we are actually providing useful information that students wanted. We’re about to begin a third round of focus groups and usability studies to see how students like the redesigned site that incorporates the comments and concerns of last summer’s focus groups.
  • Student interns: We have worked with student interns all along, who have lent us their perspective, helped design the site, and helped improve it.
  • E-mail: Students write to us every day through the site to ask questions and tell us what they think. We answer their questions, incorporate their feedback into the site in our FAQs, provide better and more relevant links, program e-mail auto-replies for frequent questions, and make navigation easier.

Enlisting the input and support of those who work with students every day – high school counselors, librarians, college administrators, and others – has also been essential to the success of the site. To make them aware of students.gov, we mailed them posters last fall and made brochures available to order. In return, we received enthusiastic customer feedback and suggestions.

Maintaining a broad, interagency outlook – continually looking beyond the boundaries of a single agency’s mission – is also necessary. To do this, we stay involved in various interagency groups like the FirstGov Cross-Agency Portal working group. This helps us stay up to date on other great federal sites, and learn about the best practices of other interagency portals.

Finally, we maintain the site by making sure we fix any broken links and keep the site information and links as current and credible as possible. Although this is fundamental, it requires a significant commitment of time and resources to do properly.

We know it's working, because students tell us they are use the site.  Close to 2,500 visitors log on to students.gov every day. Site traffic is up 62% in the last year, and the number of visits has been increasing every month.

For more information, contact Lynda Folwick at (202) 260-4087 or e-mail at lynda_folwick@ed.gov.