Web Eases College Application Process

Counselor Cynthia Martini has her hands full giving college-admission guidance to more than 1,000 students at Fullerton’s Sunny Hills High School. Her job may soon get much easier and give pupils and their parents an edge in the complicated process.

This fall, Martini became one of the first to try a new Web site created by USC’s admissions department as a sort of electronic guidance counselor to track high school students’ grades, activities and test scores and link them to information about colleges and financial aid.

“Kids at most schools wouldn’t even think to do those things until their junior or senior year, when I or one of my peers tells them to, and by then it’s almost too late,” Martini said.

“This site will enable students at even the most understaffed schools to access the same amount of information as those at little private schools,” she said.

Martini and a handful of her Southern California peers volunteered to provide the first wave of feedback about the site during a campus information fair for high school guidance counselors. The site, which cost the university $300,000 to create, became available to students this month.

USC officials say the Web site -- preparingforcollege.usc.edu -- is intended not as a recruitment tool but as a means to level the college-admissions playing field for students of varying educational and socioeconomic backgrounds.

“This is truly a public service,” said J. Michael Thompson, the Los Angeles university’s admissions director, who developed the concept last spring.

At a spring reception for incoming Sunny Hills students, Martini plans to tell families of eighth-graders to start using the site. Although she has yet to introduce the site to her students, she did create a portfolio for a fictional senior to explore its capabilities. It reminded her about financial aid deadlines and alerted her to additional classes she needed to take to be eligible for University of California campuses.

“It keeps everything organized for you, so it’s all there when it’s application time,” she said. “All those essential details in the process tend to get forgotten until the last minute when kids and their parents are freaking out about the big picture.”

Earlier this month, Los Angeles Unified School District board members voted to begin urging the district’s roughly 177,000 high school students to use the site. Such information can help close the achievement gap between ethnic and socioeconomic groups, they said.

Thompson helped launch a similar site called UC Gateways as UC Santa Cruz’s admissions director three years ago. But it is available only to participants in the UC system’s programs for high school students.

The USC site may be the only university-sponsored service that provides information about the college admissions scramble to all students, parents and counselors, not just those headed in its direction.

Those run by other universities have use restrictions or include information about only the colleges in their system, Thompson said.

Once a year, users of the USC site will be asked if they are interested in attending that school. If they say yes, their contact information will be forwarded to the university’s recruitment office. Those who say no or don’t respond can continue to use the site without further inquiries.

Registered users can create printable records of every high school course and standardized test they have taken, along with awards, extracurricular activities and work experience.

Students also can compare colleges, take IQ and personality tests, find links to other college Web pages, get financial aid and scholarship information, and access career pages such as Monster.com and the Peace Corps (www.peacecorps.gov).

Visitors could almost forget it’s a USC site. There’s just a tiny logo in one corner, and only users familiar with the campus would recognize libraries, buildings and classrooms in the “college life” photos atop each page.

“We didn’t set out to create a world where all the information was about USC,” Thompson said.

“It’s for every student, not just aspiring Trojans.”