Beyond Google & Rankings: How Soar Can Help Your Students Research Colleges Better

Beyond Google and Rankings: SOAR College Research Webinar

Speakers:

• Swami (Venkates Swaminathan) — Founder, LifeLaunchr and Soar
• Barbara Rifkind — Founder & Advisor, Arise Advising
• Claire Schadler — College Admissions Counselor, LifeLaunchr

Swami: Hi, everyone. Welcome today to our webinar, Beyond Google and Rankings. This is about using SOAR, our new platform at LifeLaunchr, to build a great college list in a thoughtful way, and I'm really excited to do this webinar today with my colleagues, Claire Schadler and Barbara Rifkin, who has been using SOAR for a while now and loving it.

The goal today — we have different audiences, and I want to address both straightforwardly. If you're a family or a student, we hope you'll see through this how SOAR helps your student research colleges and explore majors — not by just talking about rankings, but with questions that really do matter in the choices students make. And understand how your counselor, like Barbara or Claire, is using SOAR to stay connected to your student's progress between sessions.

If you're a counselor or IEC, the goal today is to show you how SOAR works through the real kinds of research questions that come up in our work — the kinds of questions your students bring, the kind you bring to this work. We'll show you some critical parts of the counselor toolkit: the meeting brief that helps you prepare before each session, as well as the college summary your student generates after doing some research. And hopefully you'll have generated a concrete answer in your mind to: what would I actually use this for? How would this affect my practice?

So all that said, let's jump in. We'll first do introductions. I'll introduce myself last — maybe we can start with you, Barbara, and then Claire.

Barbara Rifkind: Hi, folks. I'm Barbara Rifkind. I'm the founder and advisor at Arise Advising. I work in New York City. I'm a member of HECA and IECA and other organizations, and I started using SOAR a little while ago. I'm a very happy early user of it.

Swami: Claire.

Claire Schadler: Hi, everyone. I'm Claire Schadler. Like Swami said, I've been working with him — we've been working together for over a year, and I worked in college admissions for over 10 years. I've been using SOAR and just really enjoying it and finding it helpful for myself and my students. So I'm excited to talk to everyone about how it's been going and how it can be used.

Swami: My name's Swami — my full name is Venkatesh Swaminathan, but everybody calls me Swami. I founded Life Launchr in 2014. Before that I had a whole career in tech, and my graduate research at the University of Illinois was in AI — long before AI was a thing that people talked about so much. So back in the 1980s, I was researching computer vision, understanding how computers can see in the same way that human beings do.

I co-lead, along with my awesome co-leader Vinay Narang, HACA's AI Learning Lab, and I'm part of the ad hoc committee that is generating AI guidance for counselors. I'm also a member of the National Association for College Admissions Counseling. I'm really excited to be doing this today.

I think our goal with SOAR was to address the kinds of challenges that students and families all face in this process. One piece of feedback I love most is that many parents and students now see this as something that will help teach their kids how to use AI thoughtfully, ethically, responsibly — because whatever else we do when we go through this process, we're preparing our students for a life where they will have to know how to use AI well in order to be successful.

So I want to start today by just saying: let's think about how college lists are actually built today. When you ask a student, "What are you thinking?" — when we start with kids, we often ask, "What are you thinking about colleges?" And they come up with lists. "Where did you get that?" It's because it's a highly ranked college, or it's on a Google search they did. Sometimes it's because their family went there, or their cousin told them to apply there. And then of course there's Reddit and College Confidential.

Barbara, Claire — does that resonate? Is that how your students are thinking about college lists before they talk to you?

Barbara Rifkind: Absolutely. Whether they're clear about where the information comes from or not, that definitely describes it for my families.

Claire Schadler: Yeah, I completely agree. I often am like, "Yeah, that's a great school. Why are you rejecting it? Where did that come from?" And I get these answers very often.

Swami: And the other thing I want to stress is that college is really the first big decision that students make in their lives. Where they go to high school wasn't really up to them — for most students in public schools, their parents live in a community because of work, and they go to the nearby school. Even for private school students, their parents chose their school. They had no say in the matter. But college is the first adult decision that kids make. It's a big decision — where you go to college is a really important choice.

So it's the first time students have both the need and the opportunity to think wisely for themselves, because there are literally hundreds of choices out there, and choosing among them isn't simply a matter of saying which is the top ranked school. Sometimes I tell students that you wouldn't want to eat at a restaurant simply because Michelin thinks it's an awesome restaurant — if you don't like the food, it's not much good that it has a Michelin star. So you have to really get a sense of what it's like for you.

Some of you have already used SOAR, so you already know this. Some of you haven't, so I want to spend a minute or two laying the groundwork as to what SOAR is.

SOAR is a college and career planning assistant that works with your family. Students use it, parents use it, and counselors use it — a three-sided system. It works slightly differently for each category, with the idea that it keeps counselors in the loop and helps students stay on track between sessions. So it isn't simply a counselor-facing tool that we use on the back end, and it isn't simply a student-facing tool either. It's a tool that all of us collaborate on.

It isn't simply a chatbot. It can assemble thousands — tens of thousands — of words of context before answering any question, understanding students' profiles and using carefully constructed methodology. It isn't generic. Every answer is tailored to be specific to your student, to your goals, to your approach, and it isn't isolated — students, parents, and counselors all contribute to the same picture.

What does it mean to say it's not a chatbot? When you ask SOAR a question, three things happen. First, it consults verified databases — we construct college databases based on the common dataset we license using the college scorecard from the government, and we also license data from IPEDS. We have a database of thousands of scholarships and hundreds of summer programs. When you ask a question, SOAR comes back and asks our system a bunch of questions before it answers you.

Second, it applies an entire counseling framework — anywhere between 17,000 and 75,000 words of instructions. So if you have a 10-word question, SOAR might append 30,000 words to it before asking the AI.

And third, your student's profile is always there — SOAR knows about the student's GPA, test scores, budget, interests, what colleges have been assigned to them to research, what kind of research they've done already — so that every answer is specific to the student.

Does that make sense? Barbara, Claire, any questions?

Barbara Rifkind: Yeah.

Claire Schadler: Yeah. I was just going to say that I think the third feature is something I've really noticed with my students. I had one student who is interested in studying computer science, but sort of wanted more of the art side of it — the design side — didn't want just pure computer science. And when she was talking to SOAR about some of her questions, SOAR knew she had this creative side to her because she had entered her activities. SOAR knew she had done traditional Indian dance for most of her life, and brought that out — so it just feels very tailored to her and her interests, already taking all those different factors into consideration.

Barbara Rifkind: Mm-hmm. Great.

Swami: And then, so as we get into it, we'll do some demos — but before that, I want to share two stories because both Barbara and Claire have been using SOAR with real students, and I think these stories are really helpful to get a sense of how this works. Barbara, do you want to tell us a story?

Barbara Rifkind: Absolutely. So this is what happened. I woke up around 6:30 in the morning on Wednesday, May 13th, to an urgent text that a mom, a parent, had sent to me just around midnight — about six hours earlier. I work with her daughter, who had just been offered admission from the wait list to UC Berkeley's data science program.

That's a pretty high-powered program. However, she had already accepted an offer of admission from Johns Hopkins for computer science, near their home in Maryland. They had to decide whether to accept Berkeley's offer from the wait list by May 15th — that was a day or two away.

In other words, this was an enormous decision, and there was almost no time to make it. What mom wrote in her text was: "Barbara, my older daughter is very eager to encourage Allison to choose Berkeley. Allison often trusts her sister's judgment kind of blindly. What are the top five reasons to choose JHU or Berkeley? How should we gather data?"

I didn't want to hand them more generic data points or aggregated statistics. They were scientists — they knew all that. What they needed urgently were insights tied directly to their daughter, to Allison. Allison's strengths, Allison's challenges, her goals — laid out so the family could talk through these issues together in a way that actually made sense for her.

This was a genuinely successful young person, strong in the classroom, engaged outside of it. She was outgoing, social, enormously creative as well as analytical. But she had recently been diagnosed with ADHD inattentive type, and that was consistent with the fact that her mom had very closely supervised all of her schoolwork and activities through high school. So despite her natural ability and drive, she was not able to work independently.

So this was a tall order. After about five minutes of panic, I turned to SOAR. This is exactly what I typed in as my first prompt, maybe 7:30 in the morning: "My student needs to make the choice between enrolling in Johns Hopkins University with an intended CS major and UC Berkeley with a data science major. She is interested in pursuing a career in AI machine learning. She has significant interpersonal and social-emotional strengths. That said, she has quite weak executive function skills and has been very closely supervised through high school by her parents. Please first lay out the factors I should consider in recommending which college she should attend."

I refined my search a few times, sharpening the focus each round. By 8:17 that morning, I was able to reply to mom's overnight text with a full report from SOAR.

Swami: Do you want to show that?

Barbara Rifkind: The side-by-side comparison, that PDF.

Swami: Okay, let me show that.

Barbara Rifkind: In any case, the punchline: mom and the family read the report, and at 8:31 they texted back, "Your analysis is very much tailored to who Allison is. Johns Hopkins wins. Allison will land softly and develop her independence over time. Thank you."

What it did was break down the set of criteria, give an advantage or disadvantage to one school or the other. But the criteria were based on the prompts I had — not just on some objective criteria. Honestly, from a midnight text to a confident family decision in a few hours was marvelous, and SOAR made that possible.

Swami: You can see here — there's the quantitative stuff that comes from databases we have, and then what stands out to me are the details that come from the universities themselves. The summary at the end is really excellent about how this all ties into the kinds of things this student might really want to think about. Like, it talks about how distance creates a natural forcing function for independence.

This is what you were going to get at — students that struggle to function independently. The cultural insights, the human insights — I think that's really, really special.

Barbara Rifkind: I think the combination of objective data and qualitative categories with commentary made this, for a very data-driven family — but they're human beings with emotions and feelings — it really made it a shared conversation where there was no push or pull. It was a nuanced but very clearly laid-out report. I was very grateful for that.

Swami: That's such a great story. And the way you asked the question was so carefully constructed. Later as we do some of these other questions, we'll also ask the question the way a student would — very vaguely.

I love that story. I do want to say to people: if you have questions, please put them in the chat because we'd love to answer them.

The other story I want to share is the one that Claire told me. We were in a meeting and you told me about a student. Do you want to tell us?

Claire Schadler: Yeah, absolutely. So I had a student come in during one of our sessions. She had been thinking she wanted to major in psychology but wasn't sure, and she came thinking she might want to switch her focus to occupational therapy. She didn't know a lot about it — all the steps she would need to take to end up as an occupational therapist.

So in the session, we asked SOAR to give us some information about that. Our first question was simple: "Can you tell us the steps someone should take — undergrad, grad certifications, everything you would need to be a working occupational therapist?"

It gave us a lot of information. And it was information I don't have just off the top of my head — all the licenses you need, going to a board, being approved, the whole process. I don't know all of those details about occupational therapy.

So we got all of that, and it just all appeared — it laid out every single step, the details, shorter timelines and longer timelines, what grad school would look like, other specializations. And then we asked, "What kind of jobs are in a similar field but wouldn't require grad school?" Because the student didn't realize grad school would be required. She wanted to know if there was another way. We got options she wasn't interested in, so she basically realized: "Okay, to do what I want to do, grad school will be required."

But this was a student who isn't set on her major — she went from psychology to occupational therapy and has discussed other things. She was a little upset when she found out grad school would be required.

What I really appreciated was that getting all that information was very fast, and then we could use the rest of our time talking about how she felt about it. Was she frustrated or disappointed? We could go into more of a counseling session rather than having so much of it be spent on just getting that core information and facts.

And I think it could have been so much more than it needed to be if we didn't just get that information and then have that chance to talk about it.

Swami: And I think the key there is really that you were able to spend the time in your session actually talking to her — doing the job that we get paid to do, which is actually talking to kids. High quality research helps because it allows us to do our work better.

Claire Schadler: So there is one question in the chat. Someone said: "I have used similar prompts in Claude, which has provided very similar and impressive side-by-side comparisons based on very detailed and personal information that I provided. How is SOAR different than Claude?"

Swami: Yeah, it's actually a great question. First, yes — in theory you could go to Claude or ChatGPT and provide a lot of detailed information and get a very detailed answer. But there are several things that make SOAR different.

First: whether you do this or not, your students are doing this anyway. They're on ChatGPT doing their research at various points and getting information that is often inaccurate. With SOAR, your students are on SOAR doing the work, and when you meet with them, you get to see what work they did. That's really important.

Second: for every question with Claude, you would have to sit down and think about the exact context you need to provide. With SOAR, you don't have to think about it — SOAR automatically includes all the context it needs for every question. And anything you know about the student, once you tell it, it remembers and keeps track of it.

And then there's the integration with the other tools on SOAR. The SOAR summary becomes a great centralized place where all that information sits and shows up. The meeting briefs and other tools mean that when you have to meet with a student, you have all that information right at hand.

And finally: if you ask a question about a college to Claude or ChatGPT, the answer is based on general knowledge — their training data. Whereas SOAR will reach back to our systems and look at the information from the common data set and authoritative sources. SOAR is trained with authoritative information and with all the counseling methodology we have — so if a student asks about scholarships, it understands how the scholarship process works.

Claire Schadler: And I would just add: SOAR will also say it doesn't know. It's been trained to say "I don't know" if it doesn't have that information. And it's also trained not to write essays for students — so there are limitations built in that I think are very helpful.

Swami: Really important. Very important.

Claire Schadler: Swami, there are a couple other questions. Someone is asking if there is a link to preview SOAR.

Swami: There is. If you're interested, I'm happy to send you an invite. At the moment it's still in an invite-only beta, but if you're interested, you can email help@withsoar.ai and I will send you an invite to try it out. It's completely free for up to three students — you're not just previewing it, you're using it. There are no restrictions on that version other than the three-student limit.

Claire Schadler: And then just one more — a follow-up to the Claude question. That same person asked: "So as an IEC, I would upload transcripts, intake forms, meeting summaries, et cetera. How is student privacy protected?"

Swami: Great question. You're not so much uploading it as using SOAR to generate meeting summaries and putting in your students' information. Because SOAR uses the Anthropic API behind the scenes, and based on their terms of use, they will not train their models on it, and will not share this information with anyone. That protection is as ironclad as it can be. That's a huge difference from using Claude directly, where you have to be really mindful of setting your preferences. Because we use the API behind the scenes, we can be very certain that student privacy is protected.

So let's look at two demos. The first will ask: can you compare the pre-med track at each of my colleges?

[Screen share demo]

So this is what SOAR looks like. I'm logged in as a student — a test student account. You can log in as a student, as a coach, or as a parent. This student has six colleges on their list: Case Western, University of Washington, Purdue, University of Miami, UC Berkeley, and Boston College.

Now, those of you who do pre-med understand these are very, very different pre-med choices. Case Western has an exceptional pre-med program. The University of Miami has the early assurance program. UC Berkeley is obviously a very good school, but the pre-med program can be a challenge. Boston College with its Jesuit focus. Purdue is a great STEM school but not particularly pre-med. And University of Washington has a great pipeline to high-quality research.

You can see it's going through the process of asking questions and trying to generate an answer as it goes — getting details for six colleges from our systems.

The one thing I'd say that's really important about all of this is that it's designed to be run in a conversational mode. So if you say, "What's most important to me?" — you're asking all different questions. Do you want a school like CASE that's optimized for pre-med, or one where you're building strong research credentials at an elite institution? What is most important to you? The intent is to encourage really in-depth conversations.

Barbara Rifkind: Swami, I have a question. The journey to pre-med — kids will come with their assumptions. Where is the student in this hypothetical? And how would you use this to coach them about what the factors are when making an evaluation of a pre-med track?

Swami: Such a great question. The reason I would put these particular colleges on someone's list is to get them to think about how different pre-med programs are from each other. A big prestigious school like UC Berkeley or University of Washington isn't always the best pre-med program for every student.

Part of what we want from an answer like this is to help people think about how pre-med tracks are so different — so that it isn't simply a matter of ratings. It's: what is the pre-health advising? What kind of committee recommendations might they get? And if you're a counselor working with the student, you might ask: "How does the committee process this student?"

And then you can also ask a more fundamental question — "How does pre-med work, really?" — and it would walk students through that path: how does major selection work, how does advising work.

Barbara Rifkind: So it's really focused on building judgment, developing and pulling together the information and data and queries that help build criteria for a search — and judgment and evaluating that.

Swami: Yeah. And one of the things you'll see is how carefully, how much time it spends finding its facts. This is the kind of information where getting detailed and correct answers is really, really important.

Claire Schadler: And I just think it's so helpful for students, because often students are like, "Great, it's a good med program, so I'm all set. I'll add that to my list." And they forget what you said at the very beginning — how different pre-med programs can be, even among equally great schools.

Swami: And this kind of information — honestly, most counselors, even if you only work with pre-med students, may work with a small set of colleges and know the exact details. But often it's hard to know every detail for every process. The idea that a school like Case Western or UW or University of Miami has a very simple process to get a committee letter — and that committee letter is a huge difference maker for med school — is so important for students to understand.

And at the end of it, I can go back to the college list and generate what we call a source summary. It will go across every conversation you've had, the student has had, the parent has had that mentions Case Western — including their research notes — and generate a summary of how good or bad a fit Case is for this student. It gives you where you are with respect to everything on the list.

[Demo: "My parents love Texas A&M — I'm not sure it's right for me"]

Claire Schadler: I have had a lot of students ask about Texas A&M recently. When I ask them why, they just say, "I've heard it's a good school," or, "I think I'll be able to get into it." That's often the end of it. I had one student ask about it and get a lot more information — and that was the basis for a really interesting discussion about whether it was genuinely a good fit.

Swami: The programs SOAR comes up with as alternatives — and whether Texas A&M is a good fit for the student — are really the kinds of questions families often struggle with. Because if you just tell a student, "I don't think Texas A&M is right for you," that's quite hard to hear. But if you go through this process instead — "Here are some alternatives: Rice is a great choice; UT Dallas is a very tech-focused exceptional school, but doesn't have sports culture at all."

Barbara Rifkind: I love that it's giving alternatives. It's not negating the parents' original suggestion — it's additive. It's providing alternatives, not dismissing. Because you need to keep the team together, including the parents.

Swami: Yeah, and if you just tell them Texas A&M isn't a fit, it feels very judgmental.

Barbara Rifkind: Especially if the parents are very invested in it — it's where they met, where they built their careers.

A few more scenarios:

Can you help me find good UX design programs?

Swami: This is a great example of the kinds of questions where we can really excel. UX design isn't one thing — there aren't many programs literally called "UX design programs." There are programs in human computer interaction, programs in cognitive science, and these programs are all very different from each other. So when you ask SOAR this kind of question, it'll talk through how UX design is hard to find but here are alternative ways to find that kind of program.

Carnegie Mellon is perhaps the gold standard — it's the finest program, but there are choices. There are programs at SCAD, at RISD, the human computer interaction program at the University of Washington. These are very different programs, one from another. The ability to surface that is really critical.

Claire Schadler: Swami, before you move on — there's a comment about Texas A&M. Someone said: "A student who would be a strong applicant for Texas A&M might be a really strong applicant for UT Dallas, but UT Austin for an out-of-state student is a significant stretch, and Rice is a definitive odds-against. This is what I don't like about Claude and these kinds of programs — they just aren't super realistic. I guess that's what keeps us IECs valuable."

Swami: That's a good point. In this case, the student's profile is in Texas, so it's an in-state student — that's why it started with in-state choices. And at the outset when you ask broadly, it will range from MIT to less selective schools. But if you ask it to estimate likelihoods, SOAR has a careful algorithm built in. It would definitely tell you that MIT is probably an unlikely admit and that UT Dallas is a likely admit. It makes sense to start thinking broad and then narrow down.

What can I do with a sociology degree?

Swami: An important question for many students. You can see the kinds of careers that are built on sociology — social services, criminal justice, public policy, human resources, education, healthcare. And one thing it came up with was the possibility of combining sociology with data science. Turns out to be an amazing combination for kids — but there's very little chance people would've thought of that on their own. Think about demography, survey design, geographic information systems, computational social sciences — all of these are so important to talk about.

Barbara Rifkind: That really highlights the shared quality of this — these are dialogues between the student, the parents, and us. A career question might be coming up at a kitchen table, and it can be found and researched independently and together. That's a richer experience and reflects the reality of decision-making — it's a team-student decision. It is the child's first independent decision, but they're not making it in a vacuum. They're making it in the context of their family.

Swami: Exactly. These questions are happening whether we like them or not. Now they're not waiting until they come back and talk to you — that conversation happens in a way that you can see when you meet with them.

What kind of preparation is most critical for engineering professions?

Swami: This is the kind of question that happens very early in the process for many families — a kid in eighth or ninth grade says, "I think I might want to study engineering." You could go through and say, "Let's talk about academic foundations — the importance of getting to calculus, high-quality lab science classes, physics, chemistry. Outside of the classroom, extracurricular activities to demonstrate preparation." And thinking about what you want to do so you can write great essays — your why-engineering essay doesn't look like, "I loved to play Legos as a kid, so I want to be an engineer."

How searches are shared:

Swami: As a counselor, you can see all the sessions your students have done, the summaries of the research they've done, and then session summaries. Likewise, if a student logs in and you do research on their behalf, they get to see that research as well. If you have a student selected when you do research, it gets logged as part of that student's work. If you don't, it's work you did on your own.

You can also select specific student attributes — like if a student has learning differences, or is neurodiverse, or for whom religious and spiritual life matters a lot, or who may be LGBTQ+ — and SOAR will always factor that into its answers.

The Meeting Brief:

Swami: Before you have a meeting with a student, you click the Meeting Brief button. It goes through every research session the student has done since they last met with you, every session you've done on their behalf, every session their parents have done. It looks at their activities list, college list, scholarship list, writing assignments — all of it — and says: "Here's what has happened since the last time you met. Here are some important things to identify." For example: "The University of Miami Early Assurance Program was suggested in a research session, but it's important you confirm this will work for the student." Or: "The campus culture varies significantly across these six schools — worth talking about given how pre-med works."

At the end, you can save this to a new report, or paste in your transcript of the conversation with the student and draft an entire meeting report. It also generates private notes so that next time you meet with the student, you can track things that were flagged from the previous conversation.

Closing:

Swami: I think that's almost all the time we have, so let's finish up. We've gone through a lot. Are there any final questions, Claire?

Claire Schadler: Nothing in the chat now.

Swami: Since we're a little behind schedule, I think we'll finish up here. Thank you to everyone who was here. Barbara, thank you so much for being part of this conversation — I love that you did this with us. And Claire, thank you.

Anyone who wants to try out SOAR, please email me at help@withsoar.ai and you can get an invite. As I said, the best way to try it out is to invite families — it works best if your students and parents are on it as well. It's completely free for up to three students, so please give it a shot. If you want to talk about it, I'm happy to get on a call with any of you.

Barbara Rifkind: I think you've said it all. It was great — great questions from the webinar participants.

Claire Schadler: Just thanks everyone who's on the call, and thanks to you both.

Swami: Thank you all for being here with us today. I look forward to seeing you all soon. Bye now.