Pine Creek High School senior Shivam Singh’s nonprofit organization Vidya Canvas offers information and services typically provided by college consulting agencies and professionals.
What separates his services from others is that they’re all offered free of charge. The reason for this, he said, was to provide the same resources to those who couldn’t access them otherwise.
Beyond just financial costs, Singh heard from both fellow students and admissions counselors about how unprepared many often are for college applications.
“The common thing that they said was, ‘I see such bright students with such great potential and what bars them is a lack of understanding of how to mitigate the process,’” he said. “And I started thinking, ‘That’s a really big issue.’ I realized it’s not just me who’s been facing this.”
SHINING A LIGHT ON A 'DARK AREA'
It was only after “hours of combing through resources” that Singh said he had a solid understanding of what to do and what’s expected in the college system. He also learned that this understanding often comes at a price.
“Most of the resources I looked at were paid resources and thousands of dollars,” Singh said. “And college consultancy, in fact, is more of a dark area in the United States, I would say.”
The variety of college consulting services, along with their price tags, greatly varies. While free options can be found online and through local schools and nonprofits, others can cost thousands of dollars and provide specialized, individual coaching.
In Singh’s case, he said many services he utilized offered initial free packages before offering a more comprehensive plan for a price. He and his family would ultimately amass about $2,000 in costs for the services he received.
Realizing that the barrier to higher education could easily be as much about these costs rather than a student’s merit, he decided to curate what he had learned from his process and share it with others.
“Really, it’s not them (the consultants) who are getting you into that specific college you’re aiming for. It’s you,” he said. “So, if those resources are locked behind a paywall and consultancy has nothing to do with the potential of the student themselves, I think that’s very unfair and disadvantaged to everyone around the United States.”
FUTURE EXPANSION
An aspiring programmer, Singh pulled from his own experiences in mobile app design and learning about the U.S. college prep process to create a website that utilizes an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to answer students’ questions about college. Vidya Canvas also features SAT and ACT prep courses, writing guides, mock interviews, virtual college tours and a scholarship search engine.
The final product is an extension of an app he previously designed for a school project that utilized AI to determine a high school student's ideal fit based on resumes, classes taken, SAT scores and extracurricular activities.
Between the recognition that his project received and the impact he saw it have on his peers, he realized its greater potential as a product for coming graduates.
“I thought, ‘Man, I can really change people’s lives.' And that truly started motivating me to invest more and more of my time into this whole business,” he said.
From there, he began reaching out to potential donors and started a GoFundMe page to maintain the website and expand its services. To date, the nonprofit’s team has grown to 10 volunteers and partnerships with large companies like Microsoft and Apple, along with local entities like Academy D-20 to expand their scope and outreach.
As for his own personal postsecondary goals, Singh sees schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford as a “step ladder” for him to continue to develop his understanding and resources in the field of “AI for good.”
Rather than developing AI programs for applications like generated art or plagiarism, he hopes to build off of his work with Vidya Canvas and expand into other automated services to potentially include security, defense and education.
Regarding future AI-generated education services, Singh said his model could potentially branch into areas outside of college consultancy and into overall teaching for anyone regardless of their background, income or other factors.
“I would imagine that teacher being able to adapt to everyone’s learning style. If I’m a visual learner, it could teach me through visuals. Or if I learn through words and thoughts, AI could communicate that,” he said. “I think that’s the vision I’m looking for in the good that it can do and develop humanity instead of all the bad things.”
© 2025 The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
