Sneak Peek for High School College Counselors (2025)

Our coverage universe now exceeds 750 four-year U.S. based institutions as we continue to enhance regional coverage based on customer feedback. We now also cover admission profiles for over 500 departments across nearly 70 institutions, including new adds for Howard University, Florida State, all three Rutgers campuses and Baylor University.

For 2025, our coverage of University of California campuses goes "next level" by leveraging newly released data for UC campuses by academic discipline.

While we've long provided UC departmental rates, reporting conventions have been inconsistent across campuses, both in terms of depth of coverage and frequency of reporting.

The recently released data allows us to leverage admit rates AND newly introduced mid 50% GPA ranges specific to each campus and academic discipline.

With consistent coverage across all UC campuses and the new GPA data, you'll benefit from more precise school categorization, even in the absence of local context.

Newly reported data from the University of California also gives us our first glimpse into how academic rigor impacts admissibility at a national level.

The 2025 edition of College Kickstart incorporates this data by allowing UC campuses to be added to a list based on residency and three tiers of honors course count: 10+, 5-9.9 and <5 yearlong courses between grades 10-12. For example, for Fall 2023, 21% of resident applicants to UCLA with 10+ honors courses were admitted vs. 5% for those with 5-9.9 honors courses and 1% for those with less than 5 honors courses.

In the absence of local context, it's a powerful way to assess applicant admissibility—especially if your school employs a unweighted GPA.

New tags have been added to identify schools with strong programs in applied/computational math (ACM) and game design (GAME).

We've also added a tag for great colleges for first generation/low income applicants (PELL)

The 2025 edition of College Kickstart also includes a new minimum GPA capability that automatically categorizes a school as an unlikely for a student if their GPA falls below a minimum GPA threshold.

There are three types of thresholds:

• Institutional. Roughly 17% of the schools in our coverage universe have stated minimum GPA requirements. For example, the University of California requires a weighted GPA of 3.0 or higher for residents and 3.4 or higher for non-residents.
• Common Data Set histogram. When using national data, it is also possible to identify a minimum threshold from the Common Data Set if a GPA histogram is provided. For example, if the lowest non-zero GPA tier is 2.50-2.99, we can use 2.50 as the minimum threshold. Roughly
• Local Context. For those of you using local context, we can automatically determine the minimum GPA based on the profile you select at configuration. For example, if you select the Local Admitted profile, and the lowest admitted GPA for that profile is 2.85, this will become the threshold.

Minimum GPA enforcement is a great way to ensure students with particularly weak GPAs are being counseled appropriately.

Ask and you shall receive! You can now specify whether you want to include the Early Strategy, Action Plan and/or Appendices when generating a personalized plan PDF. Simply check/uncheck the boxes in each section to customize your layout.

Are you comfortable in allowing students to apply to early to unlikely schools as long as they understand the low odds of success?

If so, then take advantage of a new "No Regrets" override we're testing for 2025. When enabled, College Kickstart will no longer restrict unlikely schools to regular decision and allow early decision and early action to be considered with the appropriate caveats.

Note: to activate this feature, please send an email to your relationship manager or to support@collegekickstart.com.

In search of a way to shift a school you've adjusted from its original location to its adjusted location in the Categorization Matrix?

Then take advantage of our new "post-adjusted" display option. When you enable this option, which we're also testing in 2025, we'll attempt to shift an adjusted school from its original category/position in the matrix to its adjusted one. For example, if a school was originally categorized as an unlikely for a student and it was adjusted to a reach, we'll shift it right one cell if the reason is academic and down one cell if it's due to something affecting selectivity so it shows as a reach.

Note: to activate this feature, please send an email to your relationship manager or to support@collegekickstart.com.

We now overlay national admission rates on top of your school admit rates in the Historical Trends visualization. This will give you an easy way to compare your historical acceptance rates to overall acceptance rates reported by the included in your analysis.

CK 360™ is a fee-based option

To help you understand how score submission impacts admissibility, we've added a new Score Submission visualization to CK 360™.

This visualization breaks down your class by academic quintile and shows you score submission rates and admission rate differences between those submitting and those going test-optional. You can view results by individual institution or look at groups of institutions. You can view outcomes for one or more classes and filter results through flags if you use them.

It's a terrific way to get a handle on where score submission makes a difference and to refine your best practices for advising students.

CK 360™ is a fee-based option