Abigail Seldin


Abigail Pamela Seldin is an American philanthropist, higher education expert, and edtech entrepreneur. She is the CEO and co-founder of the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation, and is known for founding College Abacus, a net price calculator aggregator company, which she sold to Educational Credit Management Corporation. She is a Rhodes Scholar, and in 2015, she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Education category.

Early life and education

Seldin was born in January 1988 to Judith Seldin-Cohen and David Seldin. She attended Phillips Academy, followed by the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 2009 with a BA and MS degree in anthropology. While in college, Seldin co-curated a gallery exhibition, Fulfilling a Prophecy: The Past and Present of the Lenape in Pennsylvania, at the Penn Museum.
In 2008, Seldin was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford University, where she pursued a DPhil in social anthropology. She completed a fellowship in cultural heritage tourism at Hong Kong Tourism Board as a Luce scholar.

Career

In 2012, Seldin and her husband, Whitney Haring-Smith, co-founded College Abacus, a web tool that allows prospective students to compare individualized financial aid packages from various American colleges and universities. She served as the CEO of College Abacus until it was acquired by ECMC Group in June 2014 for an undisclosed seven-figure sum. After the acquisition, Seldin served as VP of Innovation at the Washington DC office of ECMC Group. Under Seldin’s leadership, the ECMC Lab collaborated with the White House and U.S. Department of Education on open data issues and on the launch of the Obama Administration’s College Scorecard initiative.
In 2019, she co-founded the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation, a charitable organization. Amid the COVID 19 pandemic, she led the creation of a no-cost online service called SwiftStudent, to help students submit a financial aid appeal to their institution’s aid office.

Personal life

Seldin met fellow Rhodes Scholar Whitney Haring-Smith in 2009 and they married in Florida in 2012.