Character Review in Admission Workshop

Build a stronger student body using character review in admission.

Join an intimate cohort (limited to 20) for Making Caring Common's Character Review in Admission workshop series.

Learn strategies to identify and evaluate character strengths in applicants.
Collaborate with experienced facilitators and peers from a wide range of institutions to solve challenges and share best practices.
Develop a customized action plan to seamlessly integrate character review into your existing process.

Join the cohort today to advance your admission process and start building a more thriving campus.

Join today

“The opportunity to consider best practices with colleagues across the industry helped affirm what we're doing well and positioned us to consider how we might serve students better by adequately assessing not just their accomplishments but their essential character.”

— Previous cohort participant

Fueled by research. Grounded in practice.

The Character Review in Admission workshop series brings the latest in research and theory together with the best practices of universities and colleges across the United States.

Six sequenced online workshop sessions (capped at 20 participants maximum) give you access to the tools, support, and scaffolding you’ll need to understand why character assessment matters in admission and learn best practices for doing it well, including strategies for recognizing strengths of a wide variety of applicants.
Cohort group of admission peers allow you to collaborate with like-minded colleagues to discuss real-life challenges and opportunities.
Experienced facilitators will guide you and other participants to consider your institution’s goals, needs, and constraints, then explore pragmatic and research-based responses.

Receive all you need over a two month period (April through June 2025) to implement a customized action-plan for incorporating character review into your institution’s holistic review process.

Join today

Frequently Asked Questions

Leaders from college admission offices who want to learn more about the effective review of applicants’ character and non-cognitive attributes and make strategic changes as part of their holistic admission process.
Admission leaders from all institution types are welcome–non-selective, selective, public, private, 4-year, 2-year etc.
Ideally, participants would have some decision-making authority within their institution/office or will work closely with decision makers throughout their enrollment in this workshop.
100% of participants in our first cohort of this series (spring 2024) agreed with the following statements:
1. “This session gave me concrete tools and strategies to do the work.”
2. “This session was a meaningful learning experience for me.”
3. “I would recommend this course to a colleague.”
Here’s what else participants from Cohort 1 had to say:
“The opportunity to consider best practices with colleagues across the industry helped affirm what we're doing well and positioned us to consider how we might serve students better by adequately assessing not just their accomplishments but their essential character.”
“These sessions provided an opportunity to pause and reflect on our current practices, and determine how we can better serve students through our selection process. The sessions helped to outline objective ways to assess character in the admission process, and also how we communicate this part of our review process to external audiences.”
“The workshop was very helpful to evaluate our current processes and presented useful tools to improve.”
Workshop sessions will occur April-June 2025. Sessions will occur on six Tuesdays with recordings of facilitator-led presentations available afterward for all participants. Most sessions will be 90-minutes. Participants will be given activities and questions to consider with their respective institutional teams between sessions.
As part of this workshop, each participant is invited to meet with MCC staff for an additional, optional 30-minute consultation.
The cost is $650.
This fee helps offset MCC’s expenses in developing and implementing the course.
We believe all colleges should be able to do this work, regardless of resources. If your institution is unable to afford this fee, but is interested in this work, please email us.
Please go here to sign up. If you have any additional questions, please reach out to Trisha Ross Anderson, MCC Director of College Admission (Trisha_Ross@gse.harvard.edu).