Character Focus Initiative

As part of NACAC’s education and training offerings, the Character Focus Initiative encompasses opportunities to support college admission counseling professionals as they advance their practice of elevating non-academic factors and character-related attributes in the admission process.

The Character Focus Initiative exists because of the importance of character assessment in the college admission process. The work of the initiative is to develop research-based resources and proven best practices for advancing the identification and consideration of positive character attributes in the admission process.

• Added 09-17-2024: 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. This acquisition led to a NACAC program called the Character Focus Initiative. 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. Members of the group presented on character in admission at various conferences and built three virtual courses designed to help admission offices recognize and assess student character attributes in their process. The Character Collaborative also held an annual meeting in tandem with the annual NACAC Conference.

Read more about the history of the Character Collaborative

Involvement in the new Character Focus Initiative is open to all NACAC members. A community on NACAC Engage will be available for any member interested in staying informed and being involved with the initiative.

An advisory group made up of former Character Collaborative board members and other NACAC members interested in the assessment of character in college admission meets regularly to discuss the initiative and continue advancing the work of this 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)

Lee Dieck
Former Character Collab. Board Member
lee.dieck@gmail.com

Nathan Kuncel
University of Minnesota
kunce001@umn.edu

Candice Mackey
LA Unified School District
candice.mackey@lausd.net

Ericka Mathews-Jackson
Wayne State University
emjackson@wayne.edu

Erby Mitchell
Hotchkiss School
admissiondean@hotchkiss.org

Kenton Pauls
ACT
kenton.pauls@act.org

Kathy Pivonka
Cathedral High School
kpivonka@gocathedral.com

Trisha Ross-Anderson
Making Caring Common
trisha_ross@gse.harvard.edu

Mark Sklarow
IECA
msklarow@iecaonline.com

Whitney Soule
University of Pennsylvania
wsoule@admissions.upenn.edu

Kris Tesoro
University of Michigan
ktesoro@umich.edu

Jonathan Williams
New York University
jbw10@nyu.edu

Joe Zachrey
Center for Leadership Development
jzachery@cldinc.org