About Early Bird College
We believe every student deserves a college admissions experience that elevates their
strengths, expands their opportunities, and helps them achieve their best-fit future.
Our Values in Action
Together, Carrie and Jessica are committed to ensuring students are not left navigating alone, but equipped, empowered, and ready to claim their future.
We built Early Bird to solve the two biggest problems in college planning: prohibitive cost and paralyzing stress. Here is how we show up for your family:
– Carrie Jorgenson & Jessica Shearon
Meet the Founders
Carrie Jorgenson
During Carrie’s junior year of high school, she played a game that changed her life. Her leadership class was asked to take “steps forward” or “steps back” based on their privilege. By the end, the room was physically divided by race and socioeconomic status. That image became Carrie’s North Star and the “why” behind her career.
She immersed herself in every corner of the system: K-12 schools, admissions offices, and eventually the private sector. While working in K-12 schools, she supported more than 1,000 families through the complexities of college planning. Her expertise was further forged at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley, where she served in the admissions offices and personally evaluated more than 2,000 application files.
The turning point came while Carrie was working in the private sector, selling elite counseling packages to high-net-worth families. She realized that she was providing a luxury service she herself could never have bought. But she also noticed something unexpected: even her most successful clients, like a high-level Google executive, were drowning in the complexity of college planning. It became clear that wealth didn’t necessarily buy clarity—it just bought a way through a confusing, stressful system that should be accessible to everyone.
It clicked then: if those at the top of the professional ladder felt this much anxiety, families without those resources weren’t just stressed, they were being left behind. Carrie built Early Bird to close that gap. Her mission is twofold: to dismantle the disparity in higher education planning and to replace the frantic “admissions race” with a sense of purpose and calm for families. She believes every student deserves the tools to find their best-fit future—not just those who can write a five-figure check.
Jessica Shearon
Suddenly, at sixteen, Jessica was on her own. She completed three years in the International Baccalaureate program when her circumstances changed overnight. She left school and began supporting herself. Quickly, she learned and pivoted life priorities, determined that she could write her own story and not become a statistic.
Over time, she rebuilt her life and education from the ground up, ultimately earning her degree and becoming one of the first women in her family to graduate from college. The process was complex; no tools could connect the dots, and there was not enough money to pay for help. Today, that complexity has significantly grown.
For more than 25 years, Jessica has built and scaled technology at companies including Apple, USAA, and Poly/HP. Her work focused on solving complex problems and anticipating needs before users could articulate them, launching and scaling products and experiences used by millions, and helping to position Poly for its $3.3B acquisition by HP.
Jessica believes education is the ultimate multiplier. She saw an opportunity to apply the same disciplined systems thinking to a place where clarity matters most, ensuring that capable students don’t lose momentum. Early Bird College was built at the intersection of lived experience and execution. It exists to provide the structured support system and forward-looking guidance Jessica never had, guidance she was forced to construct on her own, so that capable students don’t fall through the gaps of a fragmented system. The future should not depend on insider access. The future should belong to students who are ready to build it.
Jessica is the driving force behind Early Bird’s platform, committed to ensuring that the tools for a “best-fit” future are intuitive, empowering, and accessible to all. Her mission is clear: create the infrastructure she once needed and make it available at scale, so no one has to face one of life’s most pivotal crossroads alone, and so no capable student’s potential is ever left to chance.