About Advantage Point, a Tool for All Students and Counselors

Advantage Point has been developed by a group of colleagues whose collective backgrounds cover a broad range of skills and expertise in software development, research, marketing, and information systems architecture. The platform puts a set of customizable tools in the hands of high school counselors to guide their students through the process of choosing a college or vocational path following their graduation.

Advantage Point is designed so that every student's college preferences (size, location, field of study, private or public status, etc) can be built from an initial college list without having to know the schools in advance. Within this broad selection horizon, we apply sophisticated query and visualization tools to a unique combination of actual application results from the high school’s previous graduates and current, extensive post-secondary institutional data sets. Using these live visualization frames, students have the ability to compare their chosen schools, check where other graduates have submitted successful applications, search by relative affordability or selectivity of their choices and drill-down on undergraduate demographics, earnings after graduation and debt.

These unique tools guide each counselor and student to begin the actual college application process with the list of best-fit schools whether those are community colleges, small private colleges or large research universities. Each student’s data, their ultimate choices and their actual application results are built into the high school’s ongoing data sets on the platform, providing a broader pipeline for next year’s seniors as well as immediate feedback for the high school’s educators.

The platform provides high school administrators with an extensive set of metrics to help evaluate the impact of their educational strategies and innovations, and their capacity to equip students optimally for post-high school success.