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December 1, 2025
December Program Tasks
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Priority: Please continue to promote the program to generate student responses. Continue to use your tool’s roster to encourage students to take advantage of the program through their unique survey and connecting with colleges.
- At this time, if you are still in progress with your academic review and survey sending to students, an extension will need to be granted by the Direct Admissions Coordinator. Please don’t hesitate to contact Aaron if you have updates or questions about this program step.
- Per your local process, student transcripts can be sent to their colleges of requested proactive admissions. More details below.
- Invoices can be sent to our agency if data has been received and processed. More information on how to do so below. Please complete this step this month by the year’s end (that is, this month).
- Data and metrics are found below. Our new program data dashboard is also due out soon.
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Optional: Refer any new high school partners to Direct Admissions coordinator. See referral channels below. The inquiry form and application are both live.
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Optional: Plan to attend the monthly Just-in-time High School Mentor Check-in session on the morning of Wednesday, December 10th.
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Optional: Set-up the new FAFSA tracker tool.
Program updates for the month follow:
Direct Admissions Tool Usage
Your program Tool (Direct Admissions) can serve many purposes to amplify the success of the program, ranging from a roster to monitor student program engagement to a real-time list for transcript sending. Multiple users from a high school can have access to the roster, and it is primarily meant for individuals who work most closely with students on the college search process and for folks who might evaluate macro level college-access data. User view access is explained in more detail on the bottom of the High School Staff Resource Guide page. Information within the tool includes:
- Your overall roster of students sent to our agency. This feature allows you to ensure all students who are on-track to graduate and who did not opt-out are receiving program information.
- Whether a student has made at least one selection to a direct admissions college. This feature allows you to monitor basic program engagement, and you can toggle by simple fields like “yes” or “no”.
- If a selection(s) has been made (“yes”), which college(s) the student has indicated interest in. This feature allows you to monitor students’ specific college interests.
- When a student’s information was transferred along to their college selections. This feature gives you a sense of when colleges received student info as a simple date field.
If you are seeing lower than expected responsiveness from students to student surveys, or you have a college-focused event in the future, please let us know as we can certainly resend the surveys to seniors. We can also do so for individual students upon request. Also, be sure to promote the Student Center as the best resource in guiding students through the process.
Reminders
Be sure to be reminding students about sending along their transcripts to colleges they’ve requested proactive admissions to. Your local process does not need to change, and this is another possible use of your roster in the Tool. To get a better sense of when colleges prefer receiving this important document, please consult the toolkit resource: Transcript Send Timeline Table
Invoicing
Once your data has been received by the agency, you are able to invoice per your contract for program funds. More on invoicing can be found at the following toolkit resource: When and How do I Invoice OHE
Data update
It has been an incredible fall already! Thank you for all the good work. At this time, we have 224 of the 257 participating high schools whose data is received or accounted for. To date, we have had 33,274 surveys sent with 3,814 students requesting proactive admission (~12%). This is 87% of the program’s participating high schools. For perspective on the success of the programs’ changes in operations and data flow, on 11/1 of last year, we had received initial data from 96 reporting of the 179 high schools in the overall cohort, or 53%. On 12/2 of last year, we had received initial data from 138 reporting of the 179 high schools in the overall cohort, or 77%.
Direct Admissions Expansion
Program outreach for new high schools has started, and we’d appreciate your help in amplifying the program to any high schools in your nearby community who are not current participants. If there are any high schools or districts you know of whom can be contacted to participate, please don’t hesitate to let Aaron know via email. Our Direct Admissions High School Interest Form can also be shared. The application is available by request.
If you are interested in adding additional schools within the district, such as an ALC or Online High School, please also reach out to Aaron as that intake process is ready to go, too.
Monthly check-ins
Our optional Direct Admissions' “High School Mentor Meet-ups and Community of Practice” gathering is on the morning of December 10th from 8:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.
The meeting ID and passcode is as follows:
Microsoft Teams Need help?
Join the meeting now
Meeting ID: 277 387 226 787 3
Passcode: fJ3eV2yH
The FAFSA Tracker is live! This incredible tool, managed by the MN Office of Higher Education (OHE), allows high school counselors to track the FAFSA process for individual students at your school. Each high school is invited to enter into a Data Sharing Agreement (DSA) with OHE, which allows us to share private student data with approved staff at the school. From there, staff are able to view who has submitted a FAFSA, whether it is in-progress or complete, and if a FAFSA was selected for verification. Please visit the OHE website to learn more and to initiate the DSA process so you can being using the tool at your school next month. If you have questions, please reach out to OHE’s Outreach and Communications Coordinator Libby Fahrenkamp at fahrenkamp@state.mn.us
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