School Profiles Part 1: What are they? And can they help save college admissions?
For students and families embarking on the college application process, the words “holistic review” likely ring familiar. More than just a catchy witticism, holistic review has been a hallmark of the admissions process at selective American colleges for nearly a century.
Though its origins are anchored in discriminatory university practices of the early 20th century, holistic review has since become a critical lever for equity by allowing admission offices to weigh academic and nonacademic components alongside personal qualities like character and resilience. More recently, holistic review has also become a means to assess applicants within their own unique context, gauging students' accomplishments against the resources available to them.
However, underlying holistic review is the assumption that admission officers know the context of every applicant’s high school and community. The obvious reality is that this is not the case. With more than 25,000 high schools in the US, even the most well-resourced admission offices must make calculated decisions on which schools to visit during their annual recruitment travel.
Enter the school profile. An often-overlooked artifact in the application process, the school profile is an optional, multi-page document constructed by the high school. Counselors are responsible for uploading the school profile to each student’s application, along with their letter of recommendation. Unlike a letter of recommendation, the school profile is responsible for giving a high-level overview of the school’s demographics, curricular and co-curricular opportunities, grading systems, and post-graduate outcomes.
At least, it ought to be. While approximately 75% of schools may have an available school profile on hand, research by Dr. Tara Nicola suggests that less than half of school profiles include the contextual information most valuable to admission officers. Students from smaller schools without a robust college-going culture are often those that have the most to gain by providing the admissions office with additional context about their school and neighborhood community. Unfortunately, Dr. Nicola’s research shows that those very students tend to have far less critical context in their profiles than their counterparts at elite secondary schools.
Without equitable content available to admission officers, the school profile turns into one more piece of the application that disproportionately advantages students from the most resourced schools while failing to effectively champion those from the least. When schools know better, they do better. It’s not surprising, then, that independent schools–whose counselors often come into their roles from the admission side of the desk–invest heavily in these documents. Their profiles reflect the work of graphic designers and high-resolution photography, serving as a de-facto marketing tool to showcase an idyllic student experience.
“Students from smaller schools without a robust college-going culture are often those that have the most to gain by providing the admissions office with additional context about their school and neighborhood community.”
In the absence of a professional marketing team, how can schools make their profile compelling? Dr. Nicola identifies 14 critical, contextual components all schools should include on their profile so that admission officers can truly evaluate applicants holistically. These components fall into four broad categories:
Academic Curriculum
Course Listings, Graduation Requirements, Curriculum Overview, School Policies
To the admission officer, it is crucial to know if a student’s transcript reflects the courses they wished to pursue or the lack of other available options. The difference between not taking a fourth year of math out of choice is markedly different than having exhausted the math curriculum in their junior year.
Grading Systems
Grading Policies, Class Rank, GPA Distribution
As standardized testing becomes increasingly optional, the school transcript may be the only mechanism for admissions offices to gauge an applicant’s academic preparedness. Though many schools no longer rank, knowing a general grade distribution–such as the GPAs encompassing the top 10%, 25%, and 50% of a senior class–can help an admission office understand the significance of a student’s GPA in the context of their class.
Postsecondary Outcomes
College-going rate, College Destinations, Standardized Testing
Knowing what percentage of graduating seniors are matriculating to college (and the colleges that they are matriculating to) can provide much-needed perspective on the college-going culture a student is applying from. If a high school primarily sends its graduates to regional public institutions, for example, it may be all the more noteworthy that a student from that school has chosen to apply to an out-of-state liberal arts college.
School Community
Community Overview, Neighborhood, Student Demographics, Enrollment
Necessary to understanding a high school’s context is knowing who enrolls and how. Racial demographics, the percentage of English language learners, or the number of students on free and reduced lunch are all important descriptors that contribute to how an admission officer makes meaning of a student’s high school experience. Similarly, knowing whether a school directly enrolls students from its local neighborhood, selects students via lottery, or applies selective enrollment gives further insight to the challenges or affordances an applicant may have encountered.
From pundits to parents, calls for increased equity in the admission process have never been clearer. Reviewing applications holistically may indeed be the most effective way to account for students’ inequitable access to opportunity. However, this is only an effective practice if admission officers are indeed given an equitable portrayal of students’ environments. We must begin to treat school profiles with as much urgency and importance as any other component of the application. After all, we cannot pretend to assess students’ accomplishments in the context of their environment if we never learn the scope of their environment in the first place.
Written by Julius DiLorenzo, College Admission Program Coordinator. This is part 1 in a two-part series about School Profiles. Part 2 will focus on new tools recently created by MCC to support schools as they develop School Profiles.
