After Mick Hagen graduated from high school in 2003, he spent two years working as a missionary in Brazil before college. During his college admission process, he found inefficiencies with the recruiting system and decided to find a way to make changes.

“High school students want to be found, and colleges want to find students,” Hagen said. “But students didn’t have a way to get themselves on the radar to say who they were to the colleges.”

Hagen attended Princeton University for a year and continued to brainstorm ways to improve the college admissions process. After a year, he left Princeton to become the CEO of Zinch, a Web site that allows students to create profiles that include any information they would like colleges to see about them, including test scores, extracurricular activities and demographics. Student profiles can only be seen by colleges with Zinch accounts.

“Zinch is an avenue where colleges communicate and engage with high school students,” Hagen said.

Since its launch in March, Zinch has registered 195,000 students and 330 colleges. Zinch is free to students but charges colleges a subscription fee.

Cappex is a similar online company created in February but only allows schools to view a student’s profile if he or she expresses interest in that particular location.

“If colleges see information about a student, they know that the student is both qualified and interested in the school,” said Mike Moyer, president of Cappex. “List-rental services give lists of qualified students to colleges, but the colleges don’t know if students are necessarily interested.”

Alisha Gryniewicz, freshman in Engineering, said she received several letters from colleges she was not interested in last year and found it to be annoying.

“It got to the point where I was overwhelmed with the amount of letters, so I stopped reading them,” she said. “Some of those may have actually been useful.”

Larry Erenberger is the senior vice president for enrollment counseling at the National Research Center for College and University Admissions, a list-rental service. He said that the center does more than sell names and also provides students with college admissions guidance and has a monthly newsletter that helps students plan for college.

Moyer said that colleges purchasing lists of names have to contact an average of 40 students to find one who is actually interested in the school and that many schools cannot afford this kind of marketing. To help colleges, Cappex does not charge the schools and privately funds the site through advertising.