Character Focus Initiative

As one of the key initiatives of NACAC’s Center for Innovation in College Admission, the Character Focus Initiative supports college admission counseling professionals who strive to advance their practice by elevating non-academic factors and character-related attributes in the admission process.

The Character Focus Initiative promotes the importance of character assessment in the college admission process. The initiative produces research-based resources and proven best practices for advancing the identification and consideration of positive character attributes in the admission process.

• Character in Collaboration: Improving College Access Through Character Development Programming
• Assessing Character in the College Admission Process: Partnering with Youth Development Organizations to Gain Insight into Student Strengths
• The Character Focus Initiative eLearning Courses
• Research Brief: Character and the College Admission Process
• Character Counts podcasts
• Preconference seminar at NACAC Conference 2023

In 2023, NACAC acquired the work of a volunteer organization known as the Character Collaborative. The Character Collaborative, established in 2016, encompassed 74 member organizations and 300 active participants at the time of its acquisition. The vision of the group at its founding was to promote the use of character attributes in the evaluation of candidates for admission to colleges and independent schools. The Character Focus eLearning virtual courses designed by this group are linked above in Resources and Training.

In 2026, NACAC demonstrated their commitment to this important work, launching to the Center for Innovation in College Admission with the Character Focus Initiative as one of their inaugural programs. 

Read more about the history of the Character Collaborative

We welcome involvement in the Character Focus Initiative from all NACAC members.

Join our community on NACAC Engage to stay informed and be involved with the initiative!

• David Hawkins and Tom Bear: Character in College Admissions (episode of Don’t Force It: How to Get into College Without Losing Yourself in the Process podcast)
• A Question of Character: Robert Massa explains a new attempt to define character in the admissions process (Inside Higher Ed)
• Can Colleges Assess Students’ Character Development? (Christian Academia Magazine)
• Dear students: Don’t worry about being extraordinary (Harvard Gazette)
• New Research Finds That Character Counts In College Admission (Forbes)
• The Character Moment in College Admissions (Inside Higher Ed)
• To get into a top college, your character matters, too (CNBC)
• Use of Nonacademic Factors in Holistic Undergraduate Admissions Reviews (study from the Journal of Higher Education)
• When Character Calls: The most disheartening aspect of the recent admissions scandal is the absence of fundamental precepts of good character (Inside Higher Ed)