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You will come across many apps and tools online that let you apply to multiple colleges and universities without spending much additional effort. However, unless you talk to a counselor face to face or take the help of an online college counseling tool like CounselHero to find the right fit and mold your application the correct way, you may not be accepted in many of these colleges and universities. As a student, you want to go to a college that nurtures your in-built talent and skills and gives you a conducive environment to thrive. For colleges, the focus is on finding motivated students who are the best fit for their programs on offer and are more likely to attend. This way, the colleges can ensure that they get their target students and are able to fill their available slots, thus keeping their enrollment yield up. Both students and colleges can benefit from CounselHero College Admission Counseling tool that facilitates data-backed decision-making.

1- How Students Can Benefit from Online College Counseling Tool’s Data

1. Know Yourself Better

You may have a fair, vague, or no idea at all about your interests, inner qualities, skills, and more. No matter where you stand, the assessment tools you find on reputed college counselor websites can help you know yourself better. For instance, tailored assessment tests offered by CounselHero College Admission Counseling tool include Skill Assessment, Interest Assessment, Work Values Assessment, and Work Style Assessment. Each of these tests is vital as it helps decide what career path you should take.

If your chosen career doesn’t align with your aptitude, skills, work value, etc., you will be unhappy and may start looking for a job change or even consider going to a field that’s completely different from what you have trained for in college. 

Let’s assume there are two students - A and B. A takes a Work Values Assessment, understands from the results that he loves to be an independent worker and handle challenging tasks, and chooses a college course, and subsequently, a career aligned to the results.

B doesn’t take the tests, majors in a subject of his choice, and chooses a career that pays well and offers recognition too. Yet, he’s unhappy. Wondering why? Because he’s handling routine stuff day after day that bores him a lot. Additionally, he feels restricted by the hierarchy and red tape. Though there’s no work stress, he longs for a job that could let him work independently and make him feel adequately challenged. He prefers to do diverse things instead of the same old routine work day after day. Had B used an online college counseling tool like CounselHero and taken tests like Work Values Assessment, Interest Assessment, and Work Style Assessment, he would have got the data and results to know his interests and inclinations clearly and chosen a matching job. 

2. Have a Career Guide Roadmap

You don’t need to be overwhelmed by data. Instead, you should use it to your advantage. After knowing yourself better with the results of the assessment tests at CounselHero College Admission Counseling tool, you will find it easier to short-list related occupations to aim for and the majors you should study to get your chosen job later on. These test results also help you to trim down the list of colleges and universities that offer your chosen courses. You can even compare the short-listed ones based on other criteria, such as financial aid packages on offer, campus location, campus culture, access to experiential learning, etc.

3. Plan Your Coursework and Career

After you have used online tools made available at college counselor websites and short-listed the occupations you would like to choose, you will need to decide on the majors to study. For instance, if data from the test results have indicated your penchant for data and you decide to pursue the career of a data scientist, you could consider a degree in Mathematics, Statistics, or Computer Science. If you have your eyes set on majoring in Computer Science, you can consider Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, or Carnegie Mellon University. You can use CounselHero College Admission Counseling tool to compare these colleges in terms of the necessary coursework you will need to do to meet your academic goals and career preferences. The data-backed results of the comparison will help you take your final pick and plan your coursework and career accordingly.

2- How Institutions Can Benefit from Online College Counseling Tool’s Data

1. Get Useful Insight Into Students

By using the CounselHero College Admission Counseling tool, institutions and counselors can learn more about what students expect or require when it comes to educational guidance. By analyzing the students’ test results, the data and information thus gathered can be used to design and implement support guidance programs. For instance, if a student’s test results indicate her to be inquisitive and someone who’s looking to learn better with experimentation and hands-on learning methods, she should ideally be guided to apply to colleges and courses that offer access to experiential learning.

2. Leverage Data to Help Students Thrive

Institutions and counselors can use test results and data from an online college counseling tool like CounselHero to create guidance programs that help address students’ needs and career goals. Such data and assessment results can be used in diverse ways - from helping students in their academic goals to supporting and encouraging their emotional and social development and guiding them in their future career plans. For instance, by tracking the data over time, you can notice specific trends and find patterns. Say, if students in a class struggle with or show no inclination toward collaborative tasks, they may need to be counseled for it, as collaboration in today's world is a key element to succeed - be it in higher education or career.

Given below are some ways you can help your students succeed by using an online college counseling tool like CounselHero:

1. You can encourage your students to use the CounselHero College Admission Counseling tool to search for relevant occupations they may consider, based on different criteria like their test results, minimum educational requirement, average salary, etc.
2. What majors to study is another tough choice for most students. For example, those who love data can consider Finance, Business/Commerce, Mathematics, or Statistics, while the ones with a creative bent of mind can choose a Fine Arts course. Here again, CounselHero can help.
3. Once the above factors have been sorted, the next choice students have to make is about their college or university. With an online college counseling tool like CounselHero, you can help your students search which colleges or universities they should send their applications to. Such searches can be made using different criteria, such as the type of university, whether it includes campus housing or not, the maximum in-State fee and out of State fee it charges, and the State in which it’s located. Once you have the search results, you could even filter them down further to arrive at a few that are best suited to your students’ unique needs and skill-sets.
4. Scheduling course load is another big headache for many students. Again, you can take the help of the CounselHero College Admission Counseling tool to make your students’ lives easier. After your students have chosen the college/university they want to go to and the subjects they plan to major in, you can ask them to use the online college counseling tool of CounselHero. This will help them find courses based on department and grade to compare the credits they will earn. They should also find if they can enroll in dual courses and how much credit they will earn if they pass the courses with a certain grade. For instance, if a student wishes to choose journalism as a career and has decided to major with English from UC Berkeley, he could consider a double major with Media Studies and English. Doing this will position him favorably in the job market, much ahead of his counterparts who majored with just English or Media Studies. As he will get a more well-rounded education and develop a unique skill-set necessary for his chosen career, he’s likely to enjoy higher earnings than those with just a single major.

3. Taking Advantage of Other Data

Using the CounselHero College Admission Counseling tool, institutions can better engage with students, remind them of deadlines and dates of upcoming events, let them know about career fairs, events, and special online meetings, and even share, publish, or distribute vital files to help them with the college admission process. They can track all such data to know more about the kind of students who enrolled with them, which colleges or universities they went to, the most popular majors with their students, most participated school activities, etc., to predict which applicants are expected to enroll in future.

Final Words

Online college counseling tools offer loads of data to help institutions and counselors prepare their students for their chosen career paths. Students too can benefit a lot from options like the CounselHero College Admission Counseling tool that help them choose a career based on scientific, data-backed assessment tests and results.