[1] Students and their families used the College Portraits to find a presentation of comparable information that comes directly from public universities.
[2] Participating institutions used the College Portraits to provide common information prospective students and families.
The College Portraits was also used for the accreditation process as evidence of student learning outcomes, institutional improvement, transparency, and commitment to the public good.
[3] A joint project of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) in collaboration with the higher education community, VSA became VSA Analytics in 2017 - an analytics tool that aggregates publicly available data from IPEDS, NSF, the College Scorecard, and the Student Achievement Measure.
Institutions of higher education use the tool create custom peer groups for benchmarking and longitudinal analysis to support strategic planning.