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Patrick Love, High School Counselor at Concordia International School, Shanghai, shares insights and recommendations on building your school profile
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An education profile provides an overview of important information about your school's demographics, curriculum, and grading system. It is a recommended component of the application process for the Common App.
Using Cialfo to obtain data for your education profile
There are three key questions to start with when planning your school profile.
How you set up your education profile depends on what the purpose of your page is and who your main audience is.
Some schools use their profiles just for colleges, which tends to be more straightforward in terms of layout. Other schools may use it in conjunction with marketing or admissions, which makes for a more complex layout with attractive graphics. These can also be used as an information prospectus to attract the parents of prospective students.
What are some of the things that set your school apart and make it unique for students?
What are the foundational categories that should be understood about your school? What is unique or should be highlighted?
In general, basic information on the school including its history and background is a fundamental part of an education profile. You should also include demographic information on students, updates on the teaching faculty and staff, etc.
This is another fundamental aspect of an education profile. Concordia, for instance, offers a wide range of classes on top of regular high school classes, from AP classes to Honours classes and Applied Learning classes.
If you have an independent curriculum, an important part of your education profile is explaining that to college reps. Having met with many college reps over the years, Love explains that what they want is to better understand the school’s curriculum so that they can accurately assess students. Any school that has an independent curriculum will probably devote a significant portion of their education profile to explaining and outlining its curriculum.
Some questions to consider when setting up this section include:
This section highlights your students’ achievements, such as in standardized test scores and how this may compare to the national or global average.
The data for this section is largely influenced by where students apply to colleges. With an increasing number of US colleges going test-optional, this may change in the near future, as the number of students taking standardized tests will probably decrease.
How many years of matriculation data might best represent the trends and preferences of your student body? College reps always check this page carefully, so it is important to put some thought into this. College reps may notice that their university isn’t on here, in which case this presents a good opportunity to open up a conversation on how the school can better support students in gaining admission to those colleges.
Parents in competitive school markets also tend to zoom in on this page.
Cialfo makes it a breeze for college counselors to obtain up-to-date information and meaningful data on their students that can be used in their education profile.
The Matriculations Report can be accessed on Cialfo under the Reports function, which makes it simple to access collated data from cohorts of students who have graduated. You can easily filter what data you want to include with the check boxes on the sidebar.
Cialfo helps visually present the data in a number of interesting ways, which help unveil insights into your students’ performance that you might otherwise have missed.
Application Insights are useful in giving college reps an idea of the trends in your students’ applications. For instance, at Concordia, Love and his team have noticed that the average applications per student has been climbing slowly, a phenomenon that has recently been further accelerated by the pandemic and its effects.
College Board offers a sample highschool profile which can be found here. For more advice and information from fellow counselors and industry experts, including sample school profiles from actual schools, join the Cialfo Community today!
Find out more about how Cialfo supports applications to all Australian universities, while giving you a fee waiver on your first application.
Join the Cialfo Community for full access to expert insights, past webinars and up-to-date tips on the college admissions process.
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Jim Faherty from ISF Academy in Hong Kong shares tips for counselors on planning for UCAS applications for students who want to study in the United Kingdom.
