Exeter Graduates Achieve Beyond the Bubble

This is the third installment in The Exonian’s alumni feature series, spotlighting graduates from classes ‘10 to ‘14 doing extraordinary work in their fields of interest, impacting the community around them and further carrying the Academy’s mission for knowledge and goodness. Featured below is Connor Soltas ‘13, front-end developer and designer for an online service that provides SAT prep free of charge.

Connor Soltas ‘13

“Just look around you. Look at UPenn and West Philly. Yale and New Haven. UChicago and the South Side. USC and South LA. How is it that so many of the country’s great colleges and universities border our most blighted communities and yet seem to have little positive long-term impact on them whatsoever?”

“I’ve wanted to study education for a few years now, but in freshman year I started to see there might be ways for me to contribute more actively to solving these enormous social problems.”

The question, posed by Connor Soltas ‘13, is something he has been pondering for years, and also something that is undoubtedly on the minds of many people trying to address the current state of education in the United States.

Soltas, as the front-end developer and designer of Prepify, a startup seeking to provide high-quality SAT prep for free, seeks to tackle the socio-economic inequality present in higher education today.

As a student of economics at the University of Chicago, Soltas was academically exposed to many of the issues surrounding education from an economic perspective, but he seeked to get more involved beyond the books to create real change in the nationwide community of families that struggle with the meaning and price of higher education.

“There was this shift, for me—from an interest in studying the economics of education to actually doing something that would positively affect the pretty bleak situation,” Soltas said. “I’ve wanted to study education for a few years now, but in freshman year I started to see there might be ways for me to contribute more actively to solving these enormous social problems.”

The solution, for Soltas, was Prepify. Prepify is an easy-to-use, online test prep service for high school students from low-income families, but it takes the mission one step further. “Our website tracks our students’ performance and automatically identifies top candidates. We then turn around and charge universities who are able to offer financial aid for direct, personal introductions between their recruiters and promising students on our platform,” Soltas said.

As the front-end developer and designer, Soltas has been working with the ins and outs of making the experience of using Prepify the best it can be. However, for Soltas, an Exeter education helped him gain exposure long before he was so involved with this project.

“I wouldn’t have been thinking about the economics of education without people like Mr. [Giorgio] Secondi and Mr. [Townley] Chisholm. I wouldn’t have been thinking about the startup world if a PEA alum at MIT hadn’t invited me to some startup club meeting on his campus one day my senior spring. I wouldn't have met the people on my team without Exeter friends at UChicago who introduced me to their networks,” Soltas said. “These things snowball. Exeter becomes more materially valuable the more time you spend outside it, not less.”

As of now, Soltas looks forward to tackling societal problems with his innovative and entrepreneurial mindset. “I do want to keep working on ambitious approaches to large-scale problems, and in particular ones informed by lots of research the way Prepify is,” he said. “And there’s a possible “future” in which Prepify, or at least the idea of it, meaningfully shakes up the ed-tech industry and the college prep industry. That's the one I’m working toward now.”