Avani Narula ’21, Krissie Esselfie ’21
College Kickstart is being introduced as a new college software in addition to our current college software, Naviance, with hopes to help students make smarter college choices. The contract to work with College Kickstart was recently confirmed at the end of April, and the college guidance department is eager to see how it will affect the Episcopal Academy college admissions process for the juniors and seniors.
College Kickstart is not a replacement for Naviance, but it should help refine the application process. Naviance includes a wide range of college and career readiness tools, including career and academic planning, matching colleges based on interests and student goals, and providing an outlook for post-college life. Adding College Kickstart will help analyze a student’s application data and convert it into a form that will help college counselors better recommend certain colleges.
Cynthia Crum, Director for College Guidance, explains, “Naviance has a lot of information which we use in much of what we do with the students. What College Kickstart does for us is it helps analyze that data, because right now we have to go through and crunch a lot of numbers by hand. They have software in place that does all that for us.” She elaborates, “It breaks it down and looks at your application list and says, this is a well-balanced list, and grades it in ways we understand.” This grading system will help both students and counselors to create a list of colleges that will be the best fit in terms of academics and majors and make the college decision process easier. The Assistant Head of School, Paul Sanders, adds, “When you start to apply to colleges, [College Kickstart] helps you think through, saying, if you’re going to apply to these two colleges, you might also want to make sure you apply to these two. It’s using all of this data and the background to make sure the kids make the best choices possible and the best position to succeed.”
While College Kickstart is certainly a useful tool in the college application process, it only gives reassurance on what students already know. Crum points out “We can already analyze this data, but it’s nice to have an objective source step back and look at the information.” Majed Dergham, Associate Director of College Counseling, adds, “It’s also good to have this as a sort of a backup. The company is actually amazing at keeping up with the week trends, like really, really time-sensitive trends as far as applications and decisions, and drilling down to things like waitlist numbers.”
Sanders highlights the importance of remembering College Kickstart is not the only part of the application process, rather just a helpful aid, saying, “At the end of the day, the college application process is a very human thing. We’re all just looking for the place as the right fit for us. But there are numbers in the background that can help people make better decisions and we just think anything we can do to help EA students make better decisions, we should do.”
Sanders remarks, “College Kickstart is, from our perspective, the best example of a way to use data to help students and families and college counselors make the best decisions for them.” Current V Form student Carter Valerio is enthusiastic about College Kickstart and notes that “I think that this new software could help kids in my class realize reality concerning their college choices. It could help us figure out what colleges we could maybe get into depending on our options.”
Since College Kickstart was just recently added, it will be available for use for the class of 2019 in the fall. Dergham concludes that “We’ve got a great program, but we want to make sure we keep getting a little bit better every day and we think this tool might help us get a little bit better.”