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Whether you’re just starting your college and career journey in middle school or you’re getting ready for life after high school as a senior, CaliforniaColleges.edu is here to help you every step of the way.
As the State of California’s official college and career planning platform, CaliforniaColleges.edu empowers you by providing tools to help you:
- Discover your strengths and interests, learn how they connect to fulfilling careers, and understand the steps you need to realize your goals
- Plan out your high school coursework and track your grades, college and major searches, and career exploration
- Launch and track your California public college applications, as well as federal and state financial aid applications
…All in one place.
About the Tools
Our Career Assessments can help you identify your values, interests, learning styles, and strengths and learn how they can connect to fulfilling careers. Beginning in middle school, you can access the following Career Assessments:
Learning & Productivity
The Learning & Productivity assessment asks you questions about how you learn best, then uses your answers to highlight which styles of learning and what kind of learning environments might work best for you.
Interest Profiler
The Interest Profiler helps you discover how your interests connect to different careers by asking questions about how much you like or dislike different work activities. The Profiler then provides you with a list of careers that match the activities you like.
Once you reach high school, you will gain access to four additional assessments:
Work Values
The Work Values assessment asks you to rank values related to work, such as coworker relationships, creativity, and compensation. At the end, you will be presented with careers based on the values that are most important to you.
Intelligences
The Intelligences assessment asks you questions about how you think, solve problems, and come up with new ideas. Using your answers, the assessment will present you with information on your strengths, how to develop them, and what careers your strengths might match.
Personality
The Personality assessment is similar to a Myers-Briggs personality type assessment. It asks you to respond to different descriptions, then uses your responses to highlight characteristics that align to your personality and corresponding careers.
Skills
The Skills assessment will give you a better understanding of your skills as they fall into five distinct categories: Conscientiousness, Creativity
Critical Thinking, Leadership, and Social-Emotional
Ways. It’s designed to help you to develop your individual skills and find careers that are a good match for your skill set.
Our Career, Major, and College Search Tools allow you to identify potential careers that match your interests, find what majors will help you achieve your career goals, and explore what colleges best meet your needs.
Career Search Tool
The most important step in any journey is deciding where you want to go. The Career Search Tool on CaliforniaColleges.edu helps you find the right career path by allowing you to explore careers that match your interests, learn what they involve, see what kind of pay and growth potential they offer, and understand what education and skills you will need to pursue them.
Major Search Tool
Choosing the major that’s right for you is key to achieving your college and career goals. Our Major Search Tool allows you to discover programs and majors that interest you, learn more about what they involve, and find colleges that offer them.
College Search Tool
Getting the most out of your college education means finding the college that’s right for you. Our College Search Tool helps you find the best colleges for your needs in California and across the country, based on the factors that matter most to you.
Preparing to succeed in college, career, and life begins by making a plan. Our college and career planning tools can help set you up for success as you begin to plan for life after high school.
Academic Planner
Our Academic Planner can help you set yourself up for success by allowing you to plan your future coursework, review your completed courses and grades, and make sure you’re on track to achieve your college and career goals.
If you have a Partner Account, you will have your transcript data automatically populated in your Academic Planner. If you have a Basic Account, you must manually input your coursework and grades into the Academic Planner.
My Plan
My Plan helps you organize your thoughts, track steps, and develop a clear plan for the future. Under your My Plan, you’ll find a host of tools that will make college and career planning as easy as 1-2-3.
My College Plan
My College Plan helps you keep track of your favorite colleges and majors, document any college visits or presentations you have attended and even organize all your college application dates and deadlines. Have fun launching your applications to California public colleges and universities directly from the link in the College Applications section.
My Career Plan
My Career Plan helps you keep track of the careers you like and Career Assessments you’ve taken, all in one place. Create new career goals and track your progress toward meeting them. Then, reflect in your journal about the steps you are taking towards deciding what you want to be when you grow up.
My Financial Aid Plan
My Financial Aid Plan helps you keep track of all your activities related to financial aid, including your financial aid lesson progress and financial aid applications.
My Goals
To make your dreams for your future come true, you need to set the right goals along the way. My Goals helps keep you on track by allowing you to identify, set, and monitor your academic, college, and career goals.
My Journal
What you want to do about college and what career you want to pursue are very personal decisions. My Journal allows you to reflect about your past, make connections to your present, and plan for your future.
My Experiences
My Experiences helps you keep track of your strengths, what you like, and what you don’t like, and experiences to help you build your resume for internships and other opportunities.
My Documents
My Documents is your free storage space where you can save important college, career, and financial aid documents such as college essay drafts, letters of recommendation, award letters, and others.
When you’re ready to apply to colleges, you can use CaliforniaColleges.edu to check your progress towards eligibility for a UC or CSU. You’ll also be able to launch and track your applications to UCs, CSUs, and California Community Colleges—all in one place.
CSU and UC Eligibility Tools
To achieve your college goals, you need to know what you’ve accomplished and what steps you still need to take. Our CSU and UC Eligibility Tools allow you to:
- Track your progress toward meeting CSU’s and UC’s minimum GPA and “a-g” course eligibility requirements
- Identify subject areas you have not yet satisfied
- Seek advice from your counselor with any concerns about your coursework and grades
The CSU and UC Eligibility Tools are not available to Basic Accounts. If you have a Partner Account, you’ll be able to access the tools.
Launch Your California Community Colleges Application
The CCCApply application acts as your gateway to the California Community College campuses. By launching your application through CaliforniaColleges.edu, you and your counselor can track your all your community college applications in one place and verify which ones have been submitted.
Launch Your Cal State Apply Application
The process of deciding what you want to do about college is complex, but submitting your application shouldn’t be. By launching your Cal State Apply application through CaliforniaColleges.edu, you can track the status of all your CSU applications.
If you have a Partner Account, you can import your coursework from CaliforniaColleges.edu to your Cal State Apply application, which helps prevent errors that can delay or deny admission. This feature isn’t available to Basic Accounts.
Launch Your UC Application
Applying to the University of California (UC) can be an important step toward achieving your college and career goals. You can launch your application directly from CaliforniaColleges.edu, as well as track your application to any UC campus and verify that it has been submitted.
Financial aid is one of the most important and complex parts of the college application process. Through CaliforniaColleges.edu, you can access tools that will help you learn about, plan for, and apply for financial aid.
Financial Aid Lessons
CaliforniaColleges.edu’s financial aid lessons are designed with California students in mind. They’re designed so that you can navigate and complete the lessons on your own, whether you’re at home or in the classroom.
Our financial aid lessons will help you understand:
- How to find the cost of attending college.
- What financial aid options are available.
- How to apply for different types of financial aid.
- How to complete your Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) or California Dream Act Application (CADAA).
- How to choose the offers that best meet your needs.
- What steps to take after submitting your financial aid application.
- How to secure state aid.
Launching Your Financial Aid Application
You can launch your FAFSA or Dream Act Application directly from CaliforniaColleges.edu.
Tracking Your Application
When you launch your financial aid application from CaliforniaColleges.edu, you will be able to:
- Track whether you have launched, completed, and submitted your FAFSA or Dream Act Application.
- See whether or not your school district has submitted your Cal Grant GPA to the California Student Aid Commission.
Hear What Students Are Saying
How to Get a Student Account
If you’re a student in California, you can sign up for a free account on CaliforniaColleges.edu.
CaliforniaColleges.edu offers two types of accounts: Partner and Basic.
Basic Student Account
A Basic Student Account gives you access to many of the tools available on CaliforniaColleges.edu. However, you will not be able to access tools that require the upload of student courses and grades, such as the CSU and UC Eligibility Tools.
- First, check out our list of Partner Districts. If you’re enrolled in a Partner District, skip to How to Get a Partner Student Account.
- If you’re not in a Partner District, talk to your school counselor and ask if your district uses CaliforniaColleges.edu Basic Accounts.
- Once you’ve determined you’re in a district using Basic Accounts, that means your district may have already made you a Student Account. If not, your counselor will first have to create an account for you before you can register it.
Registering your Basic Student Account is easy.
Check out our step-by-step guide for registering your Student Account below or watch a video.
If you’re not able to register your Student Account, please talk to your school counselor and we’ll work with them to resolve the issue.
Partner Student Account
A Partner Account gives you access to all of the tools available on CaliforniaColleges.edu. Partner Accounts have access to additional tools that require their transcript data to be uploaded into CaliforniaColleges.edu. These tools include:
- CSU and UC Eligibility Tools that allow students to see their progress towards meeting the minimum requirements for admission to a CSU and UC.
- The ability to import verified transcript data to their California State University application.
- Take a look at our list of Partner Districts to check whether your school is in a Partner District.
- If you’re in a Partner District, then you’re ready to register your Student Account! Move on to Step 2.
- If you’re still not sure whether you’re in a Partner District or not, please talk to your school counselor.
- Once you’ve determined you’re in a Partner District, that means your district may have already made you a Partner Student Account.
- But before you can access the platform, you’ll need to register your Partner Student Account.
- Click the button below or watch the video for step-by-step instructions on how to register your Partner Student Account.
If you’re not able to register your account, please talk to your school counselor and we’ll work with them to solve the issue.
What if I’m not in a Partner District or district using Basic Accounts?
If you’ve taken the steps above and found that you are neither in a Partner District or a district using Basic Accounts, that means your district isn’t currently using CaliforniaColleges.edu.
Can I make an account on CaliforniaColleges.edu even if my district doesn’t use it?
While any student, parent, or educator in California can make a free account on CaliforniaColleges.edu, we don’t recommend making an account unless your district is officially a Partner District or district using Basic Accounts. This is because CCGI is actively working to bring CaliforniaColleges.edu to all public school districts in California so that all students are able to access the platform.
If your district becomes a Partner District or starts using Basic Accounts in the future, you might end up with a duplicate account. Your duplicate account will have to be merged with the account your district makes for you. Most likely, the information you have saved on your original account will not carry over to your new account, meaning you’ll have to start over from scratch.
How can I get my district to start using CaliforniaColleges.edu?
The best way to bring CaliforniaColleges.edu to your district is to talk to your school counselor and share the information you’ve learned with them.
We recommend sharing the How to Bring CaliforniaColleges.edu to Your School District webpage, which outlines the steps they can take to get the process started. You can even print out the page by scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking the “Print” button.