Adrian Liang had gotten one kid into a New York City public high school. When the time came to plot admissions for his next, who had different needs than the first, he developed a tool to make the process easier.
The result is NYC SIFT, which stands for School Information Finder Tool, a website that thousands of families across the city have been turning to in recent weeks. Here, they can learn about open houses, assessments, and basic information on programs and offerings. They can also input their child’s data and wish list for a high school and out pops a list of suggestions. Interest is surging; Liang reports that over the last six weeks, the site has averaged about 3,500 users a week.
His efforts join those of a handful of parents who have taken admissions to the next level–—benefiting not just their own children but many, many others who struggle to navigate a system of multiple websites, choices, rankings, assessments and general opaqueness. I spoke with him last week to talk about how SIFT was born and how data helps families make decisions.
Edited excerpts of our conversation below. You can catch a fuller version on the Epicenter podcast, available here.
S. Mitra Kalita: I came upon your site because I’ve been a member of the Applying to High School in NYC group on Facebook for a few years. This happens to be the year that my own daughter is applying so I saw your site mentioned. Can we start with the tool you built called SIFT? How did this come about?
Adrian Liang: I started last year. My youngest son was an eighth grader. So I was going through that admission process with him. I’d done it two years earlier with my older child. At the time I had built a list for my older child, and then I built a list for my younger child at the same time, just to get a headstart.
Last year, I pulled up that list that I had created two years earlier. I started to do research again, and it seemed like in those two years, not much had changed. So I was still looking at the same schools.
A lot of the data was old. I was having trouble finding new schools. And my child wasn’t as academic as my older child. So he needed something a little bit different. If you have a child that will thrive in a traditional academic setting, then I think there’s plenty of schools that people talk about.
In New York City, though, there are over 900 programs, which is great because that means there’s a school for your child. The problem is finding that school right now. You’re kind of overwhelmed with choice and without a way to kind of narrow down and look for what is that you want. That makes it really difficult.
Someone posted a spreadsheet in the Facebook group that listed all the schools. Basically I took that spreadsheet and I made a tool for myself because I started finding all this other data and I just aggregated all that data. That’s how I launched last year.
SMK: You launched it when?
AL: It was last year in the admissions period, I think it was in September I made it public. I had worked on it, maybe like a few weeks before I launched it.
SMK: Well, I have to say I am seeing it everywhere. Like I am in a lot of groups related to high school admissions, and you’ve kind of gone viral in there. What’s changed?
AL: Last year was kind of a rush in a sense that I had just made a basic version of what was already out; it was basically like MySchools [a Department of Education-run portal] and I had integrated a few other reports, like surveys and things like that.
There are different reports that the DOE has. They have a lot of reports, but they’re all over the place and different links. You have to go here and then search. You can’t find it easily. You would have to go through like 10 steps.
The difference between last year and this year was just kind of tightening up all those connections and then adding a few things like the open house newsletter, which is what I started this year. One of the things I found when I was looking for open houses was that you would have to keep checking websites over and over, like every day.
I have an automated script that runs searches through school websites. In previous years, MySchools had a calendar that showed you open houses, but it wasn’t always accurate, and it wasn’t always timely, and you would never know when your school would pop up.
You would just have to keep searching every day.
Basically, SIFT shows all of New York City high schools, their programs, and it aggregates a bunch of different data sets from the surveys to graduation percentages to class sizes. It has all these different DOE reports that do exist.
I just aggregated them all together, as much as I can find. The next part of NYC SIFT is there’s tools to predict your chances of receiving an offer from a program, suggesting programs based on your preferences, and then collecting the open house information.
SMK: This feels like the right moment to zoom out and say New York City’s high school admissions, and to some extent, middle school admissions, require you to be in a lot of places to get a lot of information. It can be very confusing, right?
I say this as someone who is pretty plugged in. What I appreciate about your tool is that it addresses this question of what becomes of parents who don’t have access to the time that I have to sit on a Facebook group and multiple chats and be sourced with information.
AL: That was one key thing when you brought up the fact that, you know, some parents like yourself do have time to dedicate to looking for schools and have the resources. I really want to try and build towards something for parents who don’t have enough time or don’t know where to look, I just want to make that process easier for them.
I’m on the Upper West Side and there’s a number of parents that I’ve heard will hire high school consultants to help them through the process. Obviously, you know, they’re filling a need. And that need is because the public school system is a bit complex and there’s a lot of moving parts to it. But I thought that was unfair because it seems to get a leg up on public school, you would need all this additional help.
I didn’t think that was particularly something that should have to exist. There’s a number of parents who have language barriers who only speak Spanish or another language. Another parent on the Facebook group, she deals with some families who just either don’t have the time or maybe they don’t have Internet access at home or their internet access is limited through their phone, so they can’t do all the searches needed A lot of times, that leaves them dependent on their school guidance counselors. Some of them are great, some of them are not so great. So if you’re unlucky, it can be hard.
Also the DOE stopped publishing the print versions of the high schools. And I heard that that was a problem for parents that didn’t have access to the internet or can’t find everything online.
SMK: Right. We often get requests from families just for us to print things out for them. I wanted to ask about the use of judgment and technology when you’re building a tool. What I like about what you’ve built is that there is some subjectivity. It feels like you’re making some recommendations based on inputs you’re getting about an individual child. Is that right?
AL: So it’s all data driven, but some of that data is subjective data. So aside from just the straight numbers of this is how many students are in the school, there are school surveys where they ask the families about safety and environment and that kind of stuff.That stuff is subjective, even though it comes out as numbers. Like 75% find the school safe and blah, blah, blah.
I’m trying to filter on this, this kind of data, which is supplied by people. It’s this process of extracting that data from the DOE and making it available to people who want to look for key things to filter their desires on.
SMK: What you’ve built reminds me a little of the civic tools we saw surge during the pandemic. Like how outlets like ours helped with vaccine registrations.
AL: There’s one thing that I also released called the SIFT advisor. You put in all of your DOE designations, like your lottery number and your group number, and then also your preferences. So it’s a mix of filters and a mix of the individualized portion of your student’s numbers and that kind of stuff. It makes suggestions on programs. In a way, that is kind of subjective, but in the background, it’s an algorithm that just has all the data available to it and tries to make the best match according to what you’re telling it.
SMK: Exactly. What you hear all the time is: Can I just find a normal high school? I don’t know if my kid is going into math or science or English or humanities. I don’t know if they want to be an actor. I would just like options for them.
AL: We’re talking about high school. I can feel the stress coming out from some people when they post on these Facebook groups. Like, ‘I got a bad lottery number.’ It’s almost like the end of the world.
I feel bad for them because we’re talking about 13-, 14-year-old kids. And I just feel sometimes that there’s maybe too much pressure. My hope is they come to the site and at least they have options to look at.
SMK: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?
AL: I went to college for engineering, and I worked out in Silicon Valley in the late ‘90s and early 2000s in that area. That was a crazy startup era. So I jumped through like five or six different companies. I’m used to doing a lot of things on my own and just wearing different hats. Making this site wasn’t really that difficult per se. It’s a very simple site, just collecting data, showing it.
I was born in New York. My family’s been here for a while. I moved out to California, but I’ve been living here for the past almost eight or nine years now.
I have a junior in high school and then a freshman this year.
SMK: And is it different when it’s your kid going through it versus when you’re building a tool for other people?
AL: I actually feel more nervous when I know that other people are using it. I feel more responsible. What if I tell them the wrong thing? I don’t want to do that.
SMK: Do you feel comfortable telling me where your kids ended up in high school?
AL: My older kid is at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, MCSM. And my youngest is at Harbor School.
SMK: Oh, that’s amazing. Aren’t they on a boat every day?
AL: Yeah, it’s amazing. I mean, I wish I had gone there for high school myself.
SMK: Are there any learnings you want to tell us about? Things you know now that might help?
AL: There’s a lot of terms and a lot of different types of programs. People just need to learn all the different abbreviations and options of schools. Once you get a hang of how the DOE defines the different programs and the different admissions methods, it makes it a lot easier.
SMK: Have you thought about what becomes of SIFT in subsequent years?
AL: It would be great if the DOE could do all the stuff that SIFT is doing. If they came in tomorrow and did everything that SIFT does, I’d be happy.
SMK: There have been some changes to this cycle. Like Manhattan schools giving priority to Manhattan residents and students. You used to be able to rank 12 schools. Now you can rank unlimited. How are you keeping up with changes?
AL: The major one would be those six programs that have the Manhattan priority. There’s a part in my site where it predicts your chances of receiving an offer. For these six programs, there’s no real way to really predict what the applicant pool is going to be this year.
I have some statistics of what it’s been in the past. With any prediction tools, you take them all with a grain of salt.
SMK: So you are giving warnings that SIFT is not exact?
AL: There’s some math behind it. I’ve been trying to get the DOE to get me some additional data. If I can get a sense of the applicant pool, I can basically predict pretty much where the cutoff should be.
SMK: We interviewed Amélie Marian a few years ago about her data sets, which parents turn to all the time to guess their chances. Are you using her data or DOE data directly?
AL: I’m not using any of her data. All this data is all from the DOE, and it’s calculated from there.
I have probably five or six FOIL requests out right now. It takes the DOE a while to respond, like two or three months. Sometimes they push it back even further.
SMK: Any other reflections you have?
AL: Not really, other than just not taking it as seriously as when we first started this with my older child. It’s easy to be scared when you don’t know something.
We were lucky in that both of my children found good schools. Just that fear … looking back, it was unwarranted. So maybe people can be more relaxed about everything.
SMK: Adrian, if you could wave a magic wand, what would high school admissions look like in New York City?
AL: I hope all this data would be available. They have it. It’s just maybe buried or disorganized. This department has one, that has this, this has the other… When this happens with companies that get to a certain size, things start to slow down in terms of how information is passed.
If I could wave a magic wand, it’d be just making all that data available to the public.
For more information on how NYC’s high school admissions works, check out our previous reports:
Your guide to navigating NYC’s high school admissions process
How lottery numbers work for school admissions, according to a computer scientist
So grateful for Adrian for giving us this tool. Super helpful and maybe DOE will take it on as it’s by far way more helpful than anything they have put out. Thank you Adrian !