Have You Seen Your High School Profile?
Thank you again to Meg Joyce for the heavy lifting on this blog and for co-authoring it with me.
Context. College admissions is all about context. Why do we tell student A that a 1350 SAT and 3 AP classes puts them in profile for X college and student B that they need a 1450 SAT and 6 AP classes to put them in profile for X college? We tell them this because they go to different high schools, and all students are always evaluated in the context of their high school. Colleges want to know what opportunities were available to you, whether you took advantage of them, and the impact you had when you did.
So, how do colleges understand the context of different high schools? This is usually where a document called the school profile comes into play.
What is the school profile? Approximately 2-4 pages in length and updated annually, school profiles provide an informational snapshot for colleges to refer to as they’re reviewing your application. School counselors attach them to every college application that comes out of their high school. While there is no standardized format or content for school profiles, there are guidelines that schools can follow, notably the ones that are published and periodically updated by the National Association of College Admission Counseling.
What kinds of information do colleges look for in school profiles?
An overview of the school community. Admissions officers want to know basic information on the size, location, population, and demographics of the school as well as the community or communities from which it draws its students. Also relevant are details about the average expenditure per student, and the percentage of the student body that receives free or reduced price lunch or are English language learners. Is the school public, independent, or charter, and is an entrance exam, application, and/or lottery required to gain admission?
Contact Information. Colleges want to know how to reach school administration, including the professionals and staff in the college counseling office. Additionally, they look at the size and structure of the school counseling office in relation to the size of the student body.
Academic Curriculum and Grading Systems. There is nothing more foundational to college admissions than a student’s transcript, but colleges need help deciphering it in a short period of time. They look to school profiles for summaries of higher level classes offered (AP, IB, Honors, etc.) and the grading scale that’s being used. We’ve seen high schools with grades up to 4.0, 4.33, 5.0, 12.0, 0-100, an IB scale of 7 possible points per class, to name a few, plus mastery transcripts with narratives instead of grades. Some schools assign extra points to honors and AP classes while others don’t, and some schools limit the number of advanced classes a student can take at a time. Others consider all of their classes to be at the honors or advanced even though they aren’t specifically designated as such. Sometimes a school will have specialized STEM or global programs, for example, that students can opt into. Clearly stating school policies and curriculum options is incredibly helpful for colleges, and ultimately it helps you, too, when colleges have at their fingertips all the information they need to make a fair assessment of your transcript.
Here in the Northeast, it is very common for high schools NOT to rank their students. Colleges appreciate it when the school profile includes a GPA distribution chart, especially when they do not have much experience with the high school. Click here for an excellent example from one of our local public high schools, New Canaan High School. Note how they include weighted and unweighted GPAs in the bar chart and that they only focus on students’ core academic GPA.
In addition to overall GPA distributions, we’ve seen some schools list grade distributions in typical junior year classes. This level of specificity provides additional context for colleges as they are trying to understand whether your B+ in AP Chemistry is actually one of the very highest in the class, and how your 3.8 compares to the rest of the GPA’s in your grade.Standardized Test Scores. Providing average and middle 50% ranges for SAT and ACT scores deepens colleges’ understanding of the high school environment. New Canaan High School’s school profile (linked above) also includes breakdowns of AP scores by subject.
Postsecondary Outcomes. What percentage of the student body goes on to two year and four year colleges, the military or trade school? Matriculation lists are also helpful, especially when they indicate how many students are attending each particular college.
Effective school profiles usually include a small number of tables, are factual, and to the point, quickly giving the reader a detailed overview of the environment and opportunities in and around the high school.
Does every high school provide colleges with a school profile? Unfortunately, only about ¾ of high schools produce a school profile. A lack of a profile is often a matter of a lack of resources and time. A couple of years ago when she worked with one of our pro-bono students, Aly helped a parent and counselor rewrite theirs to provide more relevant information about their student body and school offerings. Outside counselors and parents do not typically provide input on the school profile, but in this case the school counselor was overextended and welcomed the help. To further provide admissions offices with more similar information across high schools, especially those that do not provide a school profile, College Board developed Landscape. What is Landscape? From their website: “Landscape is a free, comprehensive resource that provides consistent high school and neighborhood information so admissions officers can fairly consider each student within the context of where they've learned and lived.”
Why are high school profiles so important? It is a matter of equity. If you put two school profiles side by side, and see that one contains a list of the 30 AP classes offered at that high school, along with the range of scores that students earned on each of those exams, and the other lists a total of just a few APs, admissions officers would draw different conclusions about a student who took two such classes at one of those schools versus the other. Similarly, consider two students who submit SAT or ACT scores that are slightly below a college’s range. The one whose score was a top score for their high school might still be an appealing candidate while the one whose score was in the bottom quarter of their high school’s middle 50% could face a tougher path toward admission, even though their scores were identical.
The same goes for a school in an affluent zip code with robust extracurricular opportunities. Colleges want to see whether you’ve taken advantage of what has been offered to you. This can take many forms. If your high school has Project Lead the Way classes and you are applying for engineering but didn’t take any of those classes, it will be noticed. If you want to study business and your high school has a business pathway with lots of classes, you should take them. At the same time, if you've held a job as a dishwasher for three years and that has kept you too busy to take many elective classes or your high school does not offer them, there is a lot you can show you learned about the restaurant industry and business as a whole from the great observations you make in your application. Your high school profile is the first step to providing context for admissions officers but please don’t forget that your application’s activities list, essays, and the additional information section are your best sources for completing the picture of who you are as an applicant.
Often the school profile comes as a surprise to students and families. Many if not most were unaware of its existence and that each student is evaluated in relation to their classmates. The school profile, in addition to your application, is what gives colleges the ability to do this. Typically, the most selective colleges are not going to admit candidates who are not in the top 5% or 10% of their class, and sometimes it even has to be the top 2% or 3% of your class. However, there are a select few high schools where that is not true. Aly’s high school, Horace Mann, is one of them. 316 out of 542 students in the last three graduating classes - 58% of the total - went on to attend 17 highly selective colleges. This is especially significant because as shown in the list below from the school counseling tab on their website, this represents only those colleges that enrolled more than 10 of Horace Mann’s graduates.
As we have said before, fair or not, which high school you attend often has a material impact on which colleges are in range for you. A recent article in The Harvard Crimson said 21 schools have sent AT LEAST 2,216 students to Harvard since 2009; most of them are private and nearly all are in the Northeast. The public schools that were on the list are in affluent, highly educated suburbs or have exam-based entrance.
A really informative, well written school profile is an important step in rectifying inequity throughout the college process, along with Landscape, Community Based Organizations (CBO’s), and organizations like the STARS College Network. STARS partners with selective colleges to help students from small town and rural areas successfully apply to and attend their undergraduate programs.
Any given college, even a relatively small one, can receive applications from thousands of high schools. Two years ago, St. Lawrence University, a small liberal arts college just a few miles from Canada, reported 1,900 separate high schools in their applicant pool! The University of Georgia received applications from almost exactly the same number of high schools, which is crazy when you stop to think about it. Even more noteworthy, this past fall Santa Clara University received early action applications from nearly 3,000 high schools, and they only have 6,100 undergrads. Each one of these thousands of high schools has its own grading system, academic and extracurricular offerings, location, and demographics. Without a school profile, it would be impossible for admissions officers to know and be current on everything about your high school, especially when coupled with frequent turnover in this very demanding job.
Don’t wait until your senior year to become familiar with your school profile. You need it in order to make informed choices during the admissions process. Nobody wants to go back to the days when Meg was a student and her high school posted everyone’s rank on a wall in the auditorium for all to see. Harsh as that was, it did serve a purpose because you always knew exactly where you stood. In this day and age of massive grade inflation (see our blog post from December 2022), our parents are often shocked when they discover where their child falls in their class. Look on the college counseling tab of your school’s website or Google the name of your high school plus the words “high school profile” to see if you can find yours online. If you’re unable to find it this way, ask your school counselor for it. Some schools are not going to be willing to share it with you. That makes your job harder but you should still try to determine your approximate rank as best you can. You should also consider the role that all the information contained in the school profile and what you tell colleges in your application will play in your admissions process. Knowledge is power. The more you understand about your context and the role it has in the admissions process, the happier you will be with your college choices.