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School Year Options in Handshake

Tawnya
  • Updated

Handshake is introducing three new school years to help institutions better classify their students, particularly for our community/technical college partners.

Schools can begin importing the new options now and planning for additional workflow changes impacted by the updates. 

To be added to or updated on student profiles, the new school year options can be imported by our partner institutions or selected by students. 

Topics:

 

How can these be used?

You can use these school years across Handshake, including in reporting, search filters, identifying Targeted Email recipients, and more. With the addition of these fields, there are likely qualifications that will need to be updated and other considerations depending on your workflows - we've outlined suggestions in the Workflow Considerations section. 

For employers, these will be added to the job form, virtual fair qualifications, and the Search Students page. In addition, for employer tools that utilize "Class of (presently Segments for Premium partners), we are mapping the new school years to align with matching "Class of". 

On the student side, these school years will be added as filters for Campus Profiles. For more information on the student experience, refer to Campus Profiles in Handshake.

 

What are the new school years? 

  • First Year Community / Technical College - This is for students who are within the first year of an associates program (For example: <30 semester credits, <45 quarter credits) 
  • Second Year Community / Technical College - This is for students who are in the second year of their associates program (For example: >30 semester credits, >45 quarter credits) 
  • Certificate Program - This is for students enrolled in a community college certificate, badge or credential-granting program or targeting a certificate from a technical bootcamp. 

 

Workflow Considerations

We recommend you review features in Handshake where you may be using qualifications based on a student's school year. This includes any active features with school year qualifications currently configured and features that will have school year qualifications.

We've outlined each area in Handshake where school years are impactful for our Career Services partners below, along with the corresponding Help Center article.

 

Importer

Schools that import student data may begin importing these new school year options now!

For school_year_name, the exact formatting is listed below. Please note the capitalization and spelling - they have to match exactly!

First Year Community / Technical College

Second Year Community / Technical College

Certificate Program

For additional information, please refer to Importing Student Data. 

 

Qualifications:

We recommend reviewing features you use that allow student qualifications to be set based on school year. This includes any active features with school year qualifications currently configured and features that will have school year qualifications:

 

Filters:

  • Search filter on Manage Students  
  • Recipient selection for Targeted Emails  
  • Search filter when viewing Job Postings  
  • Filter parameter for inviting students to a survey 

Note: There is no impact to First Destination Surveys, because recipients are defined by ‘Graduation Groups’.

 

Reporting in Analytics + dashboards 

  • Dashboards: no action needed, as these are preconfigured 
  • Saved reports in Analytics: the saved report's owner should review filters on the report and update school year selections as needed, then save the changes
  • Scheduled reports: the scheduled report's owner should review filters on the report and update school year selections as needed, then save the changes
  • New report creation: be aware of including the new fields in filters as needed

Tip: click once in the filter field dropdown to load a list of possible selections!

 

What do these school years look like for students? 

From the student perspective, when they click the school year dropdown, school years will be listed with new headers added: 

  • Community/Technical College: 
    • First year
    • Second year
  • Undergraduate
    • Freshman
    • Sophomore
    • Junior 
    • Senior
  • Graduate
    • Master's
    • Doctoral
    • Postdoctoral
  • Additional Options
    • Alumni
    • Certificate Program

Here's an example of how the dropdown will appear on the student profile: 

new_school_years.png