College Kickstart is a new technology resource available to Jesuit juniors starting the first week of December.
Provided by the counseling department, College Kickstart is a website that uses a student’s GPA (unweighted and weighted), and test scores if applicable to provide a letter grade and assessment of the student’s college lists. The website provides insight on if a student’s list is too aggressive or just right, as well as providing more schools the student may want to add or remove from their list.
“Our biggest goal for rolling College Kickstart out is really to help juniors get an understanding of making a college list a lot sooner and in a very understandable way,” College Counselor Mr. Reggie Collins said.
College Kickstart does not just help with a student’s list, but also provides summaries including application summaries as well as need and merit based financial aid summaries. Through the application plan summary, students can see deadlines, what application they should use, how many letters of recommendation a student may need, and who needs to write those letters. Merit based financial aid summaries provide specific information on each of the students specific colleges rather than broad information found on the internet.
“College Kickstart provides an organized, concise compilation of what the student needs to know for specific colleges as they embark on the admissions and financial aid process,” College Counselor Mrs. Mollie Falkner explained.
The college counseling department noted many students and families have some confusions when embarking on the college application process for the first time, and hopes to utilize College Kickstart to clear some of these up. Some of the main things the college counseling department hopes to clear up for students are affordability, admissibility, and test optional.
Concerning affordability, many families going through college admissions for the first time are blindsided by the upfront cost of college. College Kickstart will help provide a clear overview of costs for each specific college, taking into consideration financial aid, need based offers, and merit scholarship summaries. Using common data, College Kickstart can show the exact amount of merit or academic money being provided to the average student at each specific college.
“We’re hopeful that the information about college costs and also merit and need based aid in those summaries will provide families with a clearer sense, earlier on in junior year of what the cost of college is,” Mrs. Falkner said.
With Jesuit having many high achieving academic students with near-perfect GPAs and high test scores, admissibility is sometimes still a big shock for students. Many colleges that students strive for are highly selective and have very low admissibility rates. College Kickstart will help show students that they may need some less aggressive school’s that they are still excited about. By comparing students admissibility at these highly selective schools, with kids who have applied not only from Jesuit, but also schools all over the country, Kickstart will help students get a better understanding of how they need to build their list before applying.
“I think it will show students who have high academics and believe that they’re going to be admitted to all these amazing schools, to at least see, ‘I do still need to have some schools with lesser selectivity on my list that I am still excited about,’” Mr Collins said
The last thing that has become confusing for many students and family is the recently introduced test optional route. College Kickstart has a tag called High T.O. (High Test Optional) which shows the student and their counselor which schools would benefit them to submit these test scores and which they should go test optional.
“College Kickstart shows students who are nervous about not submitting a test score, ‘hey, this school accepted 70% of the test optional kids, and that data is maybe on the internet, but it’s really hard to find.’ And so having it all right here on Kickstart is really nice,” Mr. Collins said
