Northern Arizona University's Personal Advantage Application Is NOT a Scam
If you are a student living in the Southwest, there is a good chance that your information has ended up in the hands of the good folks at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ. This year you've probably even received an offer to fill out their "Personal Advantage Application" instead of the traditional NAU application that you can find on their website.
The regular NAU application isn't hard. In fact, it's one of the many applications that puts a strong focus on GPA requirements. The personal statement they require is minimal (less than 500 words) and while they do ask you about your extracurricular activities, they don't give you a lot of space to wax philosophically about what your team sport taught you about working with others.
Nevertheless, the Personal Advantage Application has arrived in many of my students inboxes promising:
- No Essay
- No Application Fee
- Two Week Turnaround
All you have to do is go to www.northernarizonau.org and fill out your personalized form in about 15 minutes and you will hear back in two weeks from NAU! In fact, they'll even bug you about it incessantly until it's done!
The problem?
The whole thing looks like a scam!
Go click on the link above. It doesn't take you to NAU's official website. It goes to a third party site that contains NAU's logo and color scheme, but no verification that it's actually set up by NAU! It resembles a classic phishing site, designed by a hacker to capture your private data.
When one of my students showed me the site, I immediately contacted NAU's admissions office and asked them about the site. At first, nobody knew what I was talking about (a bad sign!), but eventually they transfered me over to an admissions counselor. It went something like this:
Me: Hi! I'm Mark Truman, Executive Director of Omniac Education and I wanted to talk with you about your Personal Advantage Application.
Counselor: Oh! Great! We are really excited about that. Are you applying?
Me: No. I'm an independent college consultant and I'm helping one of my students fill out the application. I'm glad to hear that you know what I'm talking about because I was honestly a bit worried that the whole thing was a scam.
Counselor: ...why would it be a scam?
Me: Well, there's nothing on the site that is official from NAU.
Counselor: I think our logo is on there. Isn't it?
Me: Yeah, well I can download your logo off your website and use it for whatever I want. It's not really a signal of trustworthiness on the internet.
Counselor: Oh, that's a good point. Honestly, we have a third party vendor handle that site so I'm not sure what goes into it. But I'll bring it up with the other counselors at our meeting tommorrow.
Me: Great! Thanks for verifying it for me!
So in short, not a scam. Just a badly monitered third party vendor who still hasn't fixed the site. Feel free to fill out your Personal Advantage Application when it hits your inbox. It's perfectly safe.
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Found any other sites that look like scams...but aren't? Post them here and maybe we can verify them too!