Benji Buddy is a college planning app made by Technology Ripples, LLC. The app is intended to help students and their parents estimate the cost of college, the income available in their field, and the amount of time it will take them to pay off school after graduation. Benji Buddy is put together in a very straightforward manner, giving students and parents just the price information, without all of the high-pressure sales talk that universities usually employ to try to get students in their dorms.
Benji Buddy App review
Benji Buddy first gives you the option to connect using your Facebook account, or through the use of your e-mail address. Connecting to your Facebook fills your “Network” area with your friends, as well as their work history and school history, to help give you ideas of schools to go to and fields to enter. After you’ve signed in, you are able to select a career field, which is broken down into a couple dozen fields, ranging from Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports and Media Occupations, to Production Occupations.
After that, you have the option of selecting a school to compare to. In this area, the user is shown a list of schools, starting with those with the highest graduation rate, to choose from. From here, the user can filter out schools based on their major, location or name. After selecting the school, the user is then given the average cost of attendance, based on in-state or out-of-state tuition, as well as whether the student plans to live on-campus, off-campus or with their parents.
After this, the user is taken to a screen that also helps you plan for that expense, with spots for their anticipated scholarship help, student loans, and other factors. Finally, after these are entered, the user is able to see how much debt they will incur, and how it will drop over time, pitted against the average earnings of someone in the student’s chosen goal profession.
These figures save, and are available to view at any time in the dashboard. Included is a percentage return on income for the investment, as well as an estimation of how long it will take the student to pay off the loans. In addition, Benji Buddy offers a feed of news articles that are related to higher education and business. The articles relate to costs of school, technology and business in education, and media in general.
The main con in this app was the lack of an ability to delete your schools. The information that was viewable in the dashboard was based on the first set of data that was input for the first school, and wasn’t swipe-able. It also wasn’t possible for the user to delete the schools, so if a user were checking out a number of different schools, they would have to re-enter the information again for it to show up in the dashboard. As well, users who were testing out the cost-benefit of a longer list of schools may end up with a cluttered list of schools.
Benji Buddy is a good app when its time to compare the cost of colleges. It’s straightforward, and can give users a fantastic estimate on whether or not the school they’re thinking of applying to will be worth it, when it comes down to paying back the bills with the job they want to pursue.
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