Learning Resources

Hobsons Intersect Connects High School Counselors with College Admissions

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 06/01/17

Ed tech company Hobsons has introduced new functionality into Naviance, a K-12 college and career "readiness" program that helps counselors match up student strengths and interests with their post-secondary goals.

"Intersect," as the new feature is named, allows college admissions offices to publish information about their institutions to the high school users of Naviance and connect through a new "counselor community." On the high school side, counselors can use the functionality and the community to extend their network of college admissions contacts. The community also enables direct messaging to individual and groups of counselors. The goal is to help colleges recruit the best-fit students to their institutions.

While the community is currently being promoted primarily to Naviance customers, the company reported that later this summer it would open access to all high school counselors. At the same time, it will launch the next version of RepVisits, a service created by a counselor that it acquired a few months ago. RepVisits facilitates scheduling of high school visits with college admissions representatives. Both the community and RepVisits will have free memberships and be available through the Hobsons website.

"The Hobsons Counselor Community allows our university to have a conversation with one of the most important influencers in the college search: the high school counselor. Just like with a prospective student, having an ongoing dialogue about our university with the school counseling staff allows them to get a more complete picture about what we have to offer and more importantly, allows the high school counselors to form a clearer picture about which students at their school would be a good fit at our university," noted Michael Brown, director of admission for Heidelberg University in Ohio, in a press release. "Finding a university that is a good fit for the student is what the college search is all about."