CollegeLab at a Glance...

CollegeLab is an artificially intelligent college admissions tool that helps families and counselors better navigate and manage the college admissions process. Built using machine learning methods and the expertise of a former Ivy League Dean of Admissions, CollegeLab utilizes over 4 million student applications with outcomes to tell students their chance of admission at 500 colleges and universities, comparing 12 data points and identifying areas they should focus on to improve your chances.

Our Origins

CollegeLab started when we were approached by a data scientist we had worked with on another project. He informed us that, when doing his Masters in Data Science at Harvard, he had begun aggregating data and building an algorithm to figure out an individual’s chance of admission at various colleges. The more we learned about the capabilities of his predictions and the motivations behind the tool – helping democratize the admissions process by providing greater insights to everyone regardless of their background or socioeconomic status – the greater our interest became. And so, wanting to make this tool available to students around the world to help them with the admission process, we set out to build a simple, intuitive, and powerful interface to allow students, their families, and counselors access to these predictions, around which we’ve build a suite of tools to better manage and navigate the admissions process.

Simultaneously, we were able to connect with several former Ivy League admissions officers, including a former Dean of Admissions, to help guide us in figuring out what admissions departments care about, and to test the algorithm against their own traditional assessments with a sample set of student applications. Fortunately, we found that our algorithm agreed with the readers more than they agreed with each other, proving we had a statistically significant predictive tool, and thus, CollegeLab was born.