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    Manage expectations, empower students and recover time to advise
     
    Manage expectations, empower students and recover time to advise
    Manage expectations, empower students and recover time to advise

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Let our data-driven approach make a difference for you

Delivering high quality college planning just got a lot easier.

Using the latest admissions data, College Kickstart empowers your students to take charge of their college plans while keeping you in the loop every step of the way.

It's incredibly easy to use, tuned to each student's list of schools and academic credentials, and helps you bridge the gap between "colleges I'm thinking about" and "colleges I'm applying to."

There's simply no better way to manage expectations, engage students and free up time to do what you do best: advise!

 


Ready for a test-optional world

Ready for a test-optional world

With test-optional driving a new normal in college admissions, it's essential to stay on top of the latest national trends and how they impact test submission strategies locally for your students.

Put College Kickstart to work for you. We'll help you:

  • Track the latest standardized testing policies and score submission rates by institution
  • Automatically handle test-blind/score-free institutions when analyzing academic performance
  • Analyze and recommend opportunities to apply test-optional for each school in a student's list
  • If you use flags in your system of record to track students who applied test optional, we'll prepare reports to help you assess the impact of test submission on your historical results

It's a terrific way to ensure consistency across your team and evolve your test submission strategies looking forward.


Enriched admissions data

Enriched admissions data

If schools like Boston University, Northeastern and USC are popular with your students, you've seen firsthand why you can't afford to rely on stale admissions data to guide college plans.

College Kickstart helps you stay on top of the changes and minimize surprises. We start with the Common Data Set as our foundation, and enrich it in several ways to make sure you're working with the latest and most complete data available. We scour institutional research websites, news releases and other credible sources to track current year early and regular admission rates, key application requirements, affordability data, and even admission rates for 400+ departments across 60 popular institutions including Cornell, Tufts, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, UCLA and the University of Virginia.

Spend less time data hunting and more time being your student's college whisperer.


Empowered students

Empowered students

College Kickstart not only keeps vigil on the data for you, it also empowers your students to take greater ownership of their college plans.

Given a list of schools they have in mind and their academic credentials, we'll help:

  • Ensure their lists are balanced and set up for success
  • Capitalize on early admission opportunities
  • Minimize wasted effort along the way
  • Track key application requirements
  • Consider affordability as part of the plan

Better yet, plans are automatically updated each time the student's list of schools or academic profile changes.

It's incredibly easy to use and a far better way to get and stay organized.


Aligned expectations

Aligned expectations

Managing student/parent expectations is always a delicate task.

Let us relieve some of the stress by providing hard data to support what you know instinctively. Our objective, data-driven approach takes the emotion out of the equation and lets you spend less time being the bearer of bad news and more time on setting your students up for success.

Better yet, with our local context option enabled, you'll be able to leverage your high school's historical admissions data to drive how schools are categorized in College Kickstart. It's a powerful way to reflect the admissions reality for your specific high school


Counselor control

Counselor control

When the hard data isn't fully accounting for an applicant's special talents or circumstances, stay in control with counselor adjustments.

Counselor adjustments allow you to adjust how schools should be categorized for a particular student, making it easy to incorporate qualitative factors into list assessments.

It's a terrific way to handle applicants with special talents or circumstances, applicants applying to highly selective majors and/or applicants with inconsistent academic credentials.


More time to advise

More time to advise

Less time keeping vigil on the data and implications for your students means more time to do what you do best: advise.

Our counselor dashboard makes it easy to track the latest plans and activity history for each student under your charge. You'll have one-click access to:

  • Plan summaries
  • Key application requirements
  • Need-based financial aid ratings
  • Merit-based financial aid ratings

You'll also be able to track the impact you're having on list quality, early admission and wasted motion and quickly identify students who need more attention.


Audit trail

Audit trail

In search of an easier way to document progress with students and parents?

Our personalized plan reporting feature makes it easy to create professional quality deliverables to document progress and guide students forward. The report closely follows the structure of our web application and may be customized with your school logo and tailored commentary for each student.

Whether you use it after the first meeting, before the summer kicks in or in the early fall as you finalize plans, it's a terrific way to create an audit trail and ensure students are on the right track.


Instant admission insights

Instant admission insights

With college admissions headed to a new normal, there's an acute need for insights to guide the way.

Those insights start with national trends, but ultimately rely on your command of local results.

That's why we created CK 360™. CK 360™ is a powerful data visualization tool designed to help you glean critical insights from your data with ease.

Always on, insights to questions are always just a click or two away. It's a tremendous resource to navigate a changing admissions landscape and support conversations you're having with students, parent, team and board. Fee-based option


Streamlined board reporting

Streamlined board reporting

Outcome reports simplify the task of board reporting. You'll be able to import student outcomes, generate admission and matriculation summaries, compare school results to the latest national data and rankings, and even analyze results by quintile.

If you track outcomes directly within College Kickstart, you'll even be able to track admission rates by school category (e.g likelies, targets, reaches and unlikelies) as well as by student preference (top 1/2/3 choice)

All reports can be generated as PDFs or exported to Excel for additional spreadsheet jockeying.


Plan impact reporting

Plan impact reporting

Of course, it's not just about outcomes, it also about the journey to get there. College Kickstart makes it possible to track the impact you've had on that journey through our plan impact report. You'll be able to track student engagement levels and the impact you're having on list quality, early admission and wasted motion.


Works the way you work

Works the way you work

Use College Kickstart in the way you feel most comfortable. Plans can be driven by you, the student, or begin with you and passed to the student when you deem them ready. Better yet, you can decide on an individual student-by-student basis when to pass control, if ever.


 

In the words of our customers

Private high schools are known for their stellar college admission teams. Their work and results are one of the important factors families consider when they select a priviate school.

We're honored and proud to work with some of the best college counseling teams in the country.

  • "College Kickstart was the best investment we ever made for our community and staff — it's worth every penny!"

    Cyndy Crum
    Director of College Counseling
    Episcopal Academy
  • "College Kickstart helps take the sting out of delivering the news that a student may, for example, have too many reaches in his or her list. It provides an objective third-party evaluation of each student's college list based on real admissions data."

    Amelia Johnson
    Director of College Advising
    Indian Springs School
  • "Having the College Kickstart reports to help me prepare for my board report was a lifesaver. Instead of spending time on data collection, I was able to focus on the key messages I wanted to convey based upon the data that was in these reports.

    Lauren Lieberman
    Director of College Counseling
    Shady Side Academy
  • "We surveyed the senior class and asked them specifically about College Kickstart, and how well informed they felt about expectations and information. 100% of them felt well informed and 89% of them said College Kickstart was a really helpful tool in their process."

    Gabrielle Dorsey
    Former Director of College Guidance
    The Archer School for Girls
  • "We want to minimize the uncertainty that can surround the college selection process and empower our students to be the driver of their own journey. College Kickstart meshes perfectly with our philosophy and complements our existing tools such as Naviance."

    Amy Selinger
    Director of College Counseling
    Buckingham, Browne & Nichols School
  • "Quite possibly the most invaluable tool in my counseling arsenal, College Kickstart has transformed my list strategy conversation with students. Simple and easy to use, its robust and accurate admissions data takes the guesswork out of building a balanced list for my students. Perhaps more importantly, it also helps facilitate conversations regarding need and merit aid as well as helping students navigate the nebulous practice of demonstrated interest. Kickstart has improved my efficiency and allowed me to better serve a growing caseload of students and has been instrumental in my students connecting the dots between how their efforts in the classroom translate into opportunities for college admission across a spectrum of right-fit schools. George and his team provide excellent customer service and have an uncanny ability to anticipate counselors' needs and develop their tools accordingly. I can't recommend this service enough."

    Liz Tyng
    Director of College Counseling
    Dunn School

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