College Kickstart and Naviance

You've used Naviance to come up with a list of colleges you're thinking about.  Excellent!   

Now what? 

In this age of single digit admission rates and $75 application fees, it's no longer as simple as "just apply to them all."  

College Kickstart helps you make the leap from "colleges I'm thinking about" to "colleges I'm applying to." Read on to find out how we turn the data you've collected into a sensible and actionable plan.

Naviance helps with school selection and application logistics; College Kickstart recommends a plan

Generally speaking, your journey through college admissions with span three phases:

• A discovery phase, where you put together a list of schools of interest based on research, visits and word of mouth
• A planning phase, where you decide which schools you'll actually apply to
• A execution phase, where you get down to the business of filling out and submitting applications

Naviance is terrific at discovery and execution, but apart from presenting data it doesn't help you make the leap from "schools I'm thinking about" to "schools I'm applying to".  

That's where College Kickstart comes in.  We pick up once you've got a list of schools in mind and help you build a sensible plan around it—one that is realistic, maximizes odds, and minimizes wasted motion.

Naviance provides individual school data; College Kickstart makes sense of your overall list.

Naviance provides school information and useful scattergrams to help you see the distribution of test scores and GPAs for past applicants that have been accepted from your high school.  

But there's more to a list than looking at individual school statistics.  Like a stock portfolio, you have to be concerned about your overall "porfolio" of schools and how well it sets you up for success.  

College Kickstart does just that.  We categorize the schools on your list into safeties, targets, reaches and unlikelies based on admissions selectivity and your academic performance.  We'll then analyze your list and assign you a grade based on how well balanced your mix of schools is and the confidence level we have of you getting into at least one of them.

Naviance doesn't help you take corrective action; College Kickstart makes it brain-dead simple.

With no list analysis in Naviance, it's up to you to figure out what to do.  In contrast, College Kickstart provides specific and actionable recommendations on how to strengthen your list for better balance and odds of success.  In addition to detailed commentary, our MixFixer™ capability automatically categorizes our database of schools into safeties, targets and reaches for you and makes it easy to take corrective action.  

Naviance tracks early admission data; College Kickstart capitalizes on it to maximize admission odds.

It's one thing to track early admission data, it's another to know what to do with it.  And that's the difference between Naviance and College Kickstart.  We apply a patent pending methodology to evaluate your list for odds-boosting early admission opportunities and recommend appropriate ones for you to pursue.  

Naviance tracks application deadlines; College Kickstart creates an action plan to help avoid unnecessary application effort and cost.

Again, it's one thing to track application due dates and notification dates, and another to create a plan on top of it all.  College Kickstart evaluates the application deadlines and strategies for the schools on your list and prepares an action plan to help you avoid unnecessary application effort and cost.