College Kickstart Sneak Peek for High School College Counselors (2018)

Our coverage universe expands to over 450 institutions in 2018 with the addition of more regional colleges and the major service academies. Keep those suggestions coming!

Assured (guaranteed) admission is now handled for 25 public universities, including Washington State, the University of Nevada (Las Vegas and Reno), Arizona State and a myriad of Texas institutions. When a student's combination of residency, class rank, GPA and/or test scores satisfy a college's assured admission criteria, the school is categorized as a likely on the student's list and identified as an assured admission school. Links are also provided to check the "fine print" and ensure curriculum requirements have been satisfied.

We've added two new special filters to MixFixer™ to make it even easier to dial in on likely, target and reach schools to round out your list: one for schools with no application fee and one for schools with test optional admissions policies.

A new tag icon makes it easy to access all available tags. Use it to find schools with common characteristics (e.g. Ivy, Jesuit), schools that are test optional and/or schools with good STEM or business programs.

We continue to refine our grading system to capture more nuance. Given how competitive admissions has become, we've upped the number of likely schools we're looking for in an ideal list from one to two. If your list gets too large, we'll now also start to account for this in the list grade and suggest where to prune your list.

One of the most powerful options available in College Kickstart is the ability to use your historical admissions data to drive how schools are categorized. We call this local context, and we're excited to introduce a new workbench for 2018 to make it easy to determine how best to put local context to work for you. You'll be able to upload historical admissions data, analyze it and have everything you need at your fingertips to decide which schools to include and how.

New 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.

Of course, it's not just about outcomes, it also about the journey your students have taken to get there. College Kickstart makes it possible to track the impact you've had on that journey through our new and improved Plan Impact Report. You'll be able to track student engagement levels, average plan iterations and the impact you're having on list quality, early admission and wasted motion.

We've added more flexibility to our popular personalized plan generator. For those of you who require all students to have their applications complete in advance of the winter holidays, you'll now be able to exclude the Action Plan section from the report. As always, all College Kickstart for Counselors subscribers licensed for 10 or more students will be able to take advantage of our PDF plan generator. The report closely follows the format of our web application and can be customized with your logo and tailored commentary for your students.