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.

For those of you interested in getting some insight on how colleges make admission decisions, here's an interesting article from Nick Anderson at The Washington Post.  It's from March of this year, but it provides a glimpse of the admission process from the inside at George Washington University.  

Between your school search, bolstering test scores and GPA, and figuring out how to get in, it's all too easy to get caught up in the craziness of college admissions.  Here's a great blog post from Kim Hunter, the former Associate Director of Admissions at MIT, about the importance of maintaining perspective. 

Click here for the post.

Interested in a student perspective about College Kickstart?

Here's an article by Hanna Weiler from Berkeley High School.  Hanna is a senior and writer for the school paper, the Berkeley High Jacket.  

Having a tough time getting rolling on your college admission essays?  

Here are nine tips on putting together essays that "wow" from USA Today.

Click here for the article.

Citing better ways to evaluate academic quality and expand diversity, a new wave of colleges and universities are moving to test-optional admissions.  Institutions making the move recently include Wesleyan University, Temple University and Bryn Mawr.

Click here for the article.

Here's an insightful article from NBC News about the value of an elite education and the plight of today's middle class in affording it. With most top institutions now offering only need-based financial aid, the article asserts that middle class families are being squeezed out due to affordability and the prospect of graduating with enormous debt.

Click here for the article.

A few days ago we reported that over 90% of college lists initially submitted to College Kickstart needed improvement, and just about all of them (>90%) were too aggressive. Here are the top 5 reasons why and how to make sure it doesn't happen to you.

Are Ivy League schools overrated?  William Deresiewicz, who taught at Yale from 1998 to 2008, sure thinks so: 

Click here to read his article in the The New Republic, entitled "Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League."

Thought this article really captured the "zeitgeist" of college admissions today.  There's a vicious cycle at work where teens see 5% admission rates at Stanford and Harvard, and 90,000+ applicants at UCLA and start to feel it's a crapshoot so they end up applying to more schools to hedge their bets.  Of course, this just makes admission rates worse and so the cycle continues.

Where did the days of 3 applications and a typewriter go? 

Click here to read the article.