Are you a counselor at a school that predominantly serves first-generation, low-income and/or underrepresented students of color?
This guide will help you uplevel your ability to advocate for your students via an essential but sometimes overlooked document: your school profile.
This important PDF can help admission officers understand the context of your school community by including information on your curriculum, demographic data, the percentage of students on free and reduced lunch, and much more.
To understand why, check out this example from Achievement First, which offers a great example of how both quantitative and qualitative information can help admissions officers better understand the world your students come from.
Below, we’ll talk through how and why you can (and should) build something similar.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
(click to skip ahead)- What is a School Profile, and how does it relate to other forms of school support (i.e. recommendation letters)?
- Is a School Profile really worth spending a lot of time on?
- What should (ideally) be included in a School Profile?
- I’m a counselor who works at a school that predominantly serves FGLI and/or underrepresented students of color: should my School Profile be distinct or different in any way?
- Why is updating your School Profile in 2023 so important, particularly for counselors who support FGLI and/or underrepresented students of color?
- Do you have a “model” School Profile for a school that predominantly serves FGLI and/or underrepresented students of color?
- At my school, most students are not applying to selective colleges. Will it hurt my students if my School Profile is not full of glowing stats, high average test scores, or a matriculation list with elite colleges on it?
- I’m no design expert. Does it matter if my School Profile isn’t “pretty”?
What is a School Profile, and how does it relate to other forms of school support (i.e., recommendation letters)?
Just to cover our bases: the School Profile is a 2-4 page PDF document that is typically sent to colleges and universities (along with a student’s application, transcript, and recommendations) to help admission officers better understand each individual high school: from the local community and demographics, to grading scales and average test scores.
According to a 2020 NACAC survey, 75% of U.S. high schools maintain a high school profile—though the content and format differ widely from school to school.
Beyond a student’s transcript and individual grade reports, the school profile represents the first of three “tiers” of school advocacy:
School Profile: where the student is
Counselor Letter: who the student is
Teacher Letter: how the student learns, engages and interacts with others in an academic setting
Side note: For more advice on recommendations, check out our comprehensive counselor and teacher recommendation guides (with examples).
This chart illustrates the types of questions admission officers ask themselves as they read through your various forms of school advocacy:
Is a School Profile really worth spending a lot of time on?
Yes.
Think of it this way: if you’re going to front-load any work as an overworked, under-resourced school counselor, the School Profile is the one to prioritize.
Why?
Because it’s submitted for ALL of your students.
And here’s why it’s especially important now: After the SCOTUS struck down race-conscious admissions, the onus has fallen on students to explain their lived experiences (including, but not limited to, race) to colleges more than ever before. High school counselors can substantially help students shoulder that burden—and the School Profile can really help.
On August 14, 2023, the U.S. Department of Education released a document titled “Questions and Answers Regarding The Supreme Court’s Decision in Students For Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard College and University Of North Carolina.”
This document provides thorough examples and points of clarification around how colleges can continue to recruit and support a diverse student body in a legally permissible way.
While a lot of the guidance centers on ways that individual students can talk about their lived experience in their own application essays (side note: we have a blog with examples to help students who are considering writing about race in their application), high school and neighborhood data are mentioned extensively as valuable sources of information to colleges that are eager to build a diverse student body. Some key elements (bolding ours):
“As part of their holistic review, institutions may also continue to consider a wide range of factors that shape an applicant’s lived experiences. These factors include but are not limited to:... information about the applicant’s neighborhood and high school.”
“…In seeking a diverse student applicant pool, institutions may direct outreach and recruitment efforts toward schools and school districts that serve predominantly students of color and students of limited financial means. Institutions may also target school districts or high schools that are underrepresented in the institution’s applicant pool by focusing on geographic location (e.g., schools in the Midwest, or urban or rural communities) or other characteristics (e.g., low-performing schools or schools with high dropout rates, large percentages of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch, or historically low numbers of graduates being admitted to the institution).”
So, while you won’t be able to customize your School Profile to contextualize each individual student’s situation, you can provide helpful statistics and anecdotal details that describe the barriers and characteristics that relate to the majority of your students.
In an ideal world, a counselor could spend several hours writing each recommendation letter to give individual details and anecdotes that illustrate the quality of character and/or unique abilities of each student—but in a world where the average U.S. high school has a 408:1 student-to-counselor ratio, that’s just not possible.
Prioritizing your profile ensures that as many young people as possible benefit from your actions as a school resource and student advocate.
Additionally, some counselors re-use copy from their school profile (particularly around their community and demographics) at the top of their recommendation letters to:
Save time (and take up space, if they have a particularly large caseload).
Increase the likelihood that the admission officer will process that information.
What should (ideally) be included in a School Profile?
While there’s no “one size fits all” approach to crafting your school profile PDF, the Common Application School Report gives a solid overview of the type of content that should (at a minimum) be included:
School community and demographics
Grading scales and policies
Graduation requirements
Instructional methods
Schedules and course offerings
Testing requirements
Your academic calendar
Other extenuating circumstances
Additionally, as part of her 2021 study, “Assessing Applicants in Context? School Profiles and Their Implications for Equity in the Selective College Admission Process,” Tara P. Nicola interviewed 25 admission officers at NACAC and asked them about their hopes and preferences when it comes to school profiles.
Their recommendations fell into four key categories:
1. Academic Curriculum
How popular are advanced courses at your school?
What is the percentage of participation?
Any valuable information around tracking for advanced coursework? (e.g., Do students need to receive certain grades early on to be approved to take AP, IB, honors, and/or advanced courses?)
Are there any restrictions on when students can take Honors/AP/IB/advanced courses? Or limits on the number of advanced courses they can take?
Does your school use unconventional names to describe core academic subjects (English, math, social studies, science and/or language)?
2. Grading Systems
What is the GPA scale your school uses (if at all)?
Is there a system for weighting GPA based on advanced coursework?
Does your school make efforts to limit high grade inflation? Or are there particular courses at your school that are notoriously difficult for your students?
Does your school rank? If not, can you provide information around GPA distribution among your most recent graduating class?
3. Postsecondary Outcomes
Do you have any SAT and/or ACT data to share about your students? What about another state-based standardized test (such as Regents in New York)?
What does college and/or career counseling look like at your school?
How many students go on to four or two-year colleges post-graduation—and what are the colleges they’ve been accepted to/enrolled at?
4. School Community
What are your student demographics?
Statistics around race, gender, percent of students on free and reduced lunch, languages spoken (or spoken at home), and/or first-generation status are particularly helpful
Are there any entry requirements to attend your school (lottery, admission exam, etc.)?
What category does your school fall into (public, private, charter, etc.)?
What is the surrounding community like?
Urban or rural?
Primary employer and/or industry?
Changing demographics?
Immigrant community?
Here’s a chart with a full breakdown of the most requested School Profile from this study:
Lastly, NACAC’s Best Practices for Developing a School Profile (released April 2020) offers extensive recommendations around what information should be included, as well as tips on design and length.
I’m a counselor who works at a school that predominantly serves FGLI and/or underrepresented students of color… Should my School Profile be distinct or different in any way?
In short: yes. It should (and most likely will) be different.
How?
Consider this testimonial on Niche.com from a recent junior at Susan Miller Dorsey High School, who vividly painted their reality as a living, breathing student at the school (again, bolding ours):
My experience at Dorsey has been a rollercoaster of emotions involving racial discrimination from school police and not funding necessary resources for Black and Brown students. There are some good moments, Friday's rally bringing Black energy and pizza parties made with love. Here at Dorsey, I want to see our school upgraded with more computers, better food, construction finished, and more teachers. After the pandemic, students were more close to empathy than ever before. I want to see more mental health support to protect the students emotionally and physically. I want my school to be equally richly structured as the ones in the Valley or polished in Malibu. That space creates a myriad of opportunities for young students, like me, to have a variety of classes and clubs to choose from. We at Dorsey are empowered, student leaders. We deserve the materials to succeed in college, just like those well-funded high schools.
Or this student’s description of Manual Arts High School (which he included in one of his supplemental essays):
I look around my overcrowded 40-student classroom. On our desks, 20-year-old weary textbooks and borrowed pencils and notebooks out of the generous pockets of our underpaid teacher. The school’s halls meet me with police officers, dust-collecting counseling offices, and test scores indicating our school performs far below state and national standards. I take a wishful glance at similar communities across the state, but it’s all the same. With frustration and bewilderment, I joined YLS [Youth Liberty Squad] to fight for an equitable California education system.
The qualitative details that these students share are exactly the types of anecdotal pieces of information that are invaluable to colleges, yet are not always expressed in a student’s application, or shared by individual high schools.
For some counselors, this may be out of fear that admissions offices will think less of the high school if these details are included—but it’s actually the opposite.
Colleges are eager to better understand the students who apply—in particular, ways they might have excelled in spite of the resources available—and only have so much time and space to get to know an individual student more deeply. Common themes and experiences voiced by a high percentage of the student body, even if they are more “negative,” are not only appropriate to share as part of a profile, but are just the kind of information admission officers are seeking.
This infographic of College Board’s Landscape tool gives you a good idea of some of the high school and neighborhood indicators that colleges are eager to consider as part of their holistic review process:
College attendance
Household structure
Median family income
Housing stability
Education levels
Crime
Zooming in a tad, here are just a few examples of contextual details that are commonly seen in schools that predominantly serve FGLI and/or underrepresented students of color:
Funding, staffing and/or budgetary challenges
Sometimes counselors are afraid to “out” their schools as ones that are experiencing institutional challenges. However, it can actually be very helpful to include these details, as they can help explain thinner extracurricular profiles, lack of AP, IB or other advanced courses, teacher departures, and other challenges that might make for a less “seamless” student academic record.
Neighborhood challenges or cultural norms
For example, for schools in high-crime neighborhoods where the majority of students walk to school or commute via public transit, it might make sense that students are less involved outside of school, since staying late after school for sports or drama rehearsals could make for a more dangerous commute home.
School districts where the majority of students have family responsibilities outside of school (part-time jobs, sibling care, etc.)
Schools in rural areas often have much less of an emphasis on extracurricular activities, and fewer offerings in general
Unique challenges related to COVID-19
In many Title 1 schools, students had to pick up jobs during the pandemic to help support their families. For many, this resulted in dips in grade performance.
Internet availability is often less prevalent in many low-income communities, requiring that students wade through additional barriers during remote learning.
Immigrant cultural norms and academic preferences
Many students in schools with high immigrant populations are pressured to pursue careers or majors that are seen as more lucrative and secure—particularly in STEM fields. (For more on this topic, check out our podcast with Lorenzo Gamboa 7 Things Latinx Families Need to Know About Preparing for College — and English Versions.) Any information you can provide about particular courses, approaches, and/or opportunities to support students with this path is particularly valuable.
This is particularly helpful if your school has fewer courses related to these career paths, such as calculus
Additionally, if you happen to have any anecdotal notes or data around students who change their mind/major path upon college enrollment, that can also be helpful for colleges to know (especially when many low-income students of color apply to selective STEM programs when they might be more competitive in seeking other majors/programs).
Undermatching
Undermatching is a phenomenon in which many high-achieving low-income students do not attend more selective colleges, despite having the academic profile to be competitive applicants. There are many factors that can contribute to this, including family pressure to stay closer to home and/or commute, or a lack of exposure to various college options. Any anecdotal information you can provide about your school’s experience with undermatching can be extremely valuable for colleges to know.
For example: Karla Marquez (College Counselor, Eagle Rock High School) had to scale back group college bus tours and visits for her students (a primary mode of exposure and awareness of various college options) because of shifts in the way her district began to allocate funds to Title 1 schools.
If any of the details above sound familiar, it can be incredibly helpful to make space for them in your School Profile. Because not all colleges participate in programs like College Board’s Landscape, having these details included helps ensure that admissions officers do not overlook barriers that your students may have faced in pursuing higher education.
Why is updating your School Profile in 2023 so important, particularly for counselors who support FGLI and/or underrepresented students of color?
For many reasons. Here are some of the key ones:
More school context can help lead to better admissions results for FGLI students and underrepresented students of color.
In a 2017 experimental simulation, a fictional low-SES applicant was 26% more likely to gain acceptance when admission counselors received detailed contextual data about the student’s academic performance and school environment. This research (as well as a similar 2020 study) helped inspire The College Board’s Landscape Tool, which uses census data to help provide admissions officers with additional context about their high school and disparities between their school and home neighborhood (when it comes to educational attainment, crime, housing insecurity, etc.). And while Landscape has helped fill in some of the “context gaps” that many admissions officers were experiencing (in part due to thin school profiles), many school counselors lamented the fact that they weren’t able to provide their unique perspective on their school communities as part of these reports. Now’s your chance!
High turnover in college admission offices
While high schools are certainly reckoning with a shortage of college counselors, admission offices nationwide are reeling from the effects of the post-COVID “Great Resignation.” Because of the wave of resignations, many admission officers will be new to their institution, their geographic territory, and (perhaps) the profession more broadly. Equipping these new staff members with accurate, helpful information about your unique school community will ensure that they are reading your students in context and not “short-changing” your students or misconstruing elements of their applications.
Colleges are adjusting and (in many cases) increasing their student recruitment efforts and strategies post-SCOTUS decision to end race-conscious admissions.
Many college admission offices across the nation are deeply concerned with how the recent SCOTUS ban on race-conscious admission will impact diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on their campuses. They are turning to legally compliant methods, like heighted recruitment efforts and new technology to identify underrepresented students of color in order to mitigate the anticipated impact of the ruling. Of course, because technology and data-points only communicate a sliver of a student’s day-t0-day reality, and the points of pride and challenges of an individual high school, it’s best for individuals on-the-ground at high schools—like you!—to have a say in how college admission offices understand your school context.
The ever-evolving demographic landscape in the U.S.
Most admission offices are well aware that certain states, such as Texas, are experiencing a population boom, while other areas, such as northern New England, have a rapidly shrinking high-school aged population. These demographic shifts, understandably, influence where many schools will invest time and resources recruiting students. But overall state demographic trends don’t always reflect local communities and enclaves that deviate from the data. Consider Lewiston High School in Lewiston, ME, which, in large part because of an exponentially-growing Somali-American population, is 45% Black—an anomaly in a state that at time of writing is 93% white. Or predominantly white states like Washington, which now reports that the majority of their public school students are students of color. Thus, the local lens that you provide is invaluable for raising awareness about the “new normal” of your school and neighborhood.
Do you have a “model” School Profile for a school that predominantly serves FGLI and/or underrepresented students of color?
We sure do.
If you’re looking for a school profile that highlights the unique characteristics of a school that serves FGLI and/or underrepresented students of color, the Achievement First charter school network is pretty darn close to the gold standard.
The Achievement First charter school network operates 7 high schools across Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York. Their student population is 97% Black and Latinx and 95% free and reduced lunch.
While all Achievement First high schools use a similar template for their school profile, let’s take a look at this example from Achievement First Hartford (AF Hartford):
So, what makes this School Profile superlative?
All of the four key School Profile elements are present and explained in detail: academic curriculum, grading system, postsecondary outcomes, and school community.
Clean graphic design. While you don’t need to be a graphic designer to make an amazing profile, we do recommend using charts, tables and graphics to visually communicate important data points, such as school demographics, grade distributions, course selection, and other important details that could get lost in large paragraphs of text. More on profile design here.
It’s skimmable. In Nicola’s school profile study (discussed above), 2 out of 3 admissions officers recommended a profile that’s easy to skim through to gather a firm grasp of the school context and college-going culture.
They make helpful comparisons between AF Hartford’s student population and the broader state and national high school-aged population. Beyond test score comparisons (which is, of course, helpful for providing context), AF Hartford also mentions school-specific norms about things like grade inflation, which is much more prevalent in wealthier schools. This helps an admissions officer not “ding” AF Hartford’s students as much for not having a flawless, straight A record.
They mention unique programs and initiatives designed to help their students succeed—including ones that wouldn’t be included in a census data report. From a college success/cohort model program (where students receive support post-graduation) to high participation in pre-college summer programs, AF Hartford’s qualitative explanations help provide an even richer picture of what sets their students apart.
At my school, most students are not applying to selective colleges. Will it hurt my students if my School Profile is not full of glowing stats, high average test scores, or a matriculation list with elite colleges on it?
Many counselors who work at schools like this worry that their students will be “short-changed” in the admission process because their school (and profile) doesn’t look like this, this or this.
While it’s true that an admissions officer reading applications from your school may be more confident admitting students more liberally from a school with more resources and a strong college-going culture, it’s important to remember that they are not flippantly or automatically discrediting your school for not having as many resources, AP or IB courses, or super-high test scores.
What’s helpful for them to know are some of the reasons why that may be and where the student they’re reviewing lives and learns. For many schools, higher education attainment patterns and academic performance are closely linked to longstanding forms of inequity, intergenerational poverty, and institutional racism: redlining, “white flight,” and school funding changes, to name a few. The more you include about school and community-related challenges, the more the admission officer will understand why students from your high school may not have as many “shiny stats” as a more privileged school down the road.
Now, with a 2-3 page PDF that needs LOTS of critical information, you don’t have time or space for an in-depth history lesson, but a brief synopsis of the local community that your school serves (similar to Lewiston High School’s “Community” section) allows the reader to better understand any barriers that your students may have faced while pursuing their education.
Even with these details and explanations, though, do know that admissions officers at selective institutions might feel less confident in admitting students who are further down your GPA scale, particularly if your school is substantially below-average among any of these college-readiness data points:
Less than 44% percent of your students enroll at four-year colleges
Your college acceptance list/matriculation list is predominantly comprised of less-selective institutions (75%+ acceptance rates)
Your average SAT score is below 1000
Your average ACT score is below 20
Think of it this way: an admission officer may be more wary of admitting a student outside the top 10% at Alliance College‐Ready Academy High School #5, where the student’s average test scores and matriculation list are less competitive, versus admitting a student in the top 50% at a school like Phillips Exeter Academy, where 99% of students attend selective four-year colleges.
For more on how admissions officers factor in school context, we recommend reading Tony Jack’s The Privileged Poor, which compares the experiences of low-income students who are “doubly disadvantaged” (i.e., came from an underfunded public school) to “the privileged poor” (low-income students who attended well-funded high schools, often elite prep or independent schools).
So, what do you do if your students are “doubly disadvantaged”? Consider:
Spotlighting any college access programming available at your school, including Federal TRIO Programs, GEAR UP, or AVID.
It’s particularly helpful if you can spotlight student outcomes/academic performance for students enrolled in these programs versus overall student data.
Highlighting any popular CBOs that your high-achieving students may be involved in (such as Los Angeles’ College Match or Schuler Scholars in the Chicagoland area).
Participation in application programs like QuestBridge, which serves high-achieving low-income students.
Explaining a unique magnet or gifted/talented program at your school.
Again, this allows the admissions officer to disaggregate context around top performers at the school, and give them a fair shake in the process.
Keeping track of data around students enrolled in different magnet/advanced programs at your school (or students in the AP/IB curriculum) in a platform like SCOIR, Naviance, or MaiaLearning can help with your reporting.
Short quotes/testimonials from high-achieving students within your school community who experienced more “anomalous” college outcomes.
Consider asking them: What would you want college admissions officers to know about our students and their motivations to pursue higher education? Were there any elements of our school experience that made it particularly difficult to achieve academic success?
These above strategies, of course, will not change the nature of an admissions committee’s view of your school entirely, but it will help give a greater sense of confidence or security to an admissions officer who may be reading a small handful of applications from your high school, possibly preventing their being discouraged by the surface-level data points that don’t address the complexities of the inequities our schools experience.
I’m no design expert. Does it matter if my School Profile isn’t “pretty”?
Ultimately, no: what’s most important is that your profile includes as many helpful details that fit into the four key school profile elements (academic curriculum, grading system, postsecondary outcomes, and school community) as possible—regardless of the formatting.
That said, good graphic design has been statistically proven to improve a reader’s retention of key messages, especially in a world where:
93% of all human communication is visual
Color improves brand awareness by 80% (of course, a school isn’t a brand… but you get the idea)!
94% of customers would quit visiting a website with poor graphic design
Regardless of whether you create your profile in Microsoft Word or Powerpoint, Adobe Indesign, Canva, or another design platform, these key design recommendations are helpful to keep in mind:
Charts are your friend! Faby Vallejos, an admissions officer at Georgia Tech, recently had this to say about her institution’s preferences and hopes when it comes to profiles:
“We like charts 🙂 As you can tell, charts and graphics make it so much easier to read and digest information from a school. Listing of course offerings, grading scale, extracurricular activities, school demographics, graduation/volunteer requirements, contact information for counselors, class rank (if offered), school culture, class size, grad rates etc are all really helpful information that allow us to gain a better perspective of that high school.”
That said, there is such a thing as chart overload—especially if the charts are presenting data that is irrelevant, or uses an acronym or school-specific metric that might not be familiar to an admissions officer.
Lack of section breaks and too many long paragraphs. This makes it much easier for important school details to get lost in the shuffle. Anything numeric or involving percentages/long lists of text (such as a course listing) are better suited in a graph or chart format.
Consistent fonts and colors. Sticking with one or two fonts (maybe one for section headings and another for the body of your profile) as well as your school colors helps the information or presentation not get too distracting.
Consider adding one (or two) photos that capture your school community. This could possibly serve as a header (seen in this school profile here)
If you’re interested in upleveling your school profile design, here are a few Canva templates to consider using:
Here are some additional recommendations, if design support is something you’re hoping for:
Enroll current students as interns in your office and have them help with this task. They can put it on their resume and highlight it as a leadership opportunity.
Engaged and/or interested parents with experience or interest in design could also potentially serve as collaborators.
Ask admission reps for feedback on your school profile and/or send out a Google Form to contacts in your email list. You can also use this email list to ask college admission offices directly.
Browse through some of these school profile examples for design (and content) inspiration:
