HAMPTON — The season of college visits, applications and essay writing is upon us and many colleges are taking time to visit high schools to recruit their newest cohort.
Hampton City Schools had 1,470 graduates in 2018 with 616 planning to attend a four-year college and 305 planning to attend a two-year college, according to their website.
Jennifer Oliver, one of two college and career coaches for Hampton’s high schools, spends her time advising the students of Bethel and Hampton High School.
Drawing the colleges in
Three years ago Hampton and Phoebus were targeted for a program called Rep-Visits.
Rep-Visits is a software that universities, colleges and high schools can use to help schedule visits.
Now all high schools in Hampton are using this software.
High schools will post their available dates and times for colleges to come visit, then colleges can see when the high schools are available, Oliver said.
Basically, this program allows for the high schools and colleges to communicate much easier, she said.
Since they started using this program, the number of colleges coming to visit high schools have increased exponentially, she said.
In addition to the software, Oliver will reach out to colleges for visits.
Students can use their Naviance dashboard, the site that holds information on colleges visiting and other college resources, to sign up for visits and find other pertinent information about applying to colleges.
Hampton City Schools use workshops to teach essay writing, application filling out, asking for letters of recommendation, testing sites and anything else college related, Oliver said.
Students who go to Hampton or Phoebus High School also have the added advantage of participating in Virginia College Application Week and Super FAFSA Days.
Those two schools were picked because of the number of students on free/reduced lunch, Oliver said.
Bethel High School and Kecoughtan High School do not participate in Super FAFSA Days but are afforded the same educational resources, she said.
Who’s looking?
Oliver said over the past few years more and more out of state colleges have been recruiting at Hampton schools.
She attributes this to the rigor of their academics, their IB program, their dual enrollment students and their scholarly athletes.
A few examples of out of state colleges that have been heavily recruiting recently are University of Pennsylvania, University of Alabama and colleges as far south as Florida.
With the addition of the Academies of Hampton and their first cohort graduating in 2021, more colleges have been eyeing Hampton schools, Oliver said.
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Colleges are interested in students who are ready to start majors in the STEM fields, and the academies are preparing the students for just that, she said.
“We are making our students college career and life ready,” Oliver said.
To learn more about the college admission resources that Hampton City Schools provides, click here.
