The University will accept certificates of completion from Schoolhouse.world, a nonprofit co-founded by Sal Khan, where students can engage in one-on-one guided discussions on “hot-button issues.”
Columbia will begin taking into account the “readiness to engage in civil discourse” of some applicants in the 2025-26 undergraduate admissions cycle. The University, along with five other colleges, has partnered with the educational platform Schoolhouse.world to introduce an optional supplemental portfolio reflecting applicants’ participation in discussions of “hot-button” issues with their peers.
Prospective students can receive these “Dialogue portfolios” through a program from Schoolhouse.world that allows students to engage in guided one-on-one Zoom conversations and civil discourse on topics such as immigration, Israel and Palestine, and artificial intelligence.
After a dialogue session, which typically runs about 45 minutes, students rate each other on skills like empathy, passion, and respect, and can submit a portfolio containing the number of sessions they attended and relevant quotes from the sessions to the University, which will be evaluated in a prospective student’s application. Spectator interviewed Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy and a co-founder of Schoolhouse.world, to discuss why he founded the platform and how colleges such as Columbia might use it.
Like standardized testing scores, including the SAT or ACT, supplementary certificates from the Dialogues program are an optional part of the application process.
Khan first co-founded Schoolhouse.world as a peer tutoring platform, where students can become certified tutors and submit those certifications in their college applications. He later introduced Dialogues as an opportunity for students with diverse viewpoints to talk to each other, steered by a conversation guide.
Several universities, including Columbia, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University, will accept portfolios highlighting the number of Dialogue sessions a student has participated in and selected quotes from the peer feedback component in the upcoming 2025-26 admissions cycle, the first year the program is available.
The program advertises itself as a way to “stand out with a unique extracurricular opportunity that colleges are looking for,” and has gained national media attention.
“Everyone else is sitting on social media lobbing insults at each other, or just sitting in their own bubbles and then complaining about other people’s bubbles, and here people are actually breaking out of those bubbles,” Khan said in an interview with Spectator.
According to Khan, Schoolhouse.world ran a pilot version of the program with approximately 2,000 sample conversations and then reviewed the data. Students filled out surveys expressing their views on “hot-button issues” and were matched with students who express different points of views. Popular issues include artificial intelligence, immigration, gun control, and higher education.
Columbia will accept Dialogues portfolios, as well as Schoolhouse.world’s tutoring certificates, as part of the supplementary materials a prospective student can submit with their application. These materials are not required and often take the form of academic research or creative portfolios, such as music or dance performances.
“The ability to engage in civil discourse is an important component of any student’s success at Columbia,” the University’s admissions website states, adding that the Dialogues program “provides an opportunity for you to build your skills in engaging with differences of opinion and demonstrate your readiness to engage in civil discourse on campus.”
The University has made dialogue initiatives available to current students throughout the ongoing protests over the war in Gaza, including “listening tables,” during which faculty members preside over listening sessions between students, faculty, and staff on issues such as antisemitism.
After the University announced a deal with President Donald Trump’s administration to restore federal funding, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote in a press release that, according to one of the terms of the deal, the University will bring “viewpoint diversity” to their Middle Eastern studies programs. Viewpoint diversity, which is often used to mean increasing the amount of intellectual perspectives on campus, has been a focal point in the reforms the Trump administration has sought to implement in higher education.
“Columbia’s reforms are a roadmap for elite universities that wish to regain the confidence of the American public by renewing their commitment to truth-seeking, merit, and civil debate,” McMahon wrote.
According to Khan, students can select specific quotes from the feedback survey to share with colleges, which provides students with an opportunity to get constructive feedback without “feeling like, ‘Oh, this is going to ruin my chance of getting into Columbia.’”
The Schoolhouse.world website states that students can request changes to their Dialogues portfolio, including “specific self reflection quotes or peer feedback quotes” and “removing mentions of your political viewpoints in quotes that appear in your portfolio.”