Create and Assign Educational Characteristics to Students

To determine a student's eligibility for a course during a specific time frame, define and assign educational characteristics.

Required Editions

Available in: Lightning Experience

Available in: Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer Editions with Education Cloud and Education Cloud Advanced Academic Operations for Experience Cloud add-on

User Permissions Needed
To create and assign educational characteristics:	Education Cloud Full Access
To edit relevant objects:	Education Cloud Advanced Academic Operations Admin Access

Create educational characteristic types, such as academic profile, undergraduate, or dean’s list.
A type is a category of educational characteristics. You can create hierarchies among educational characteristic types, up to three levels. For example, you can have Academic Profile as the parent type of Undergraduate, and then nest Dean’s List below Undergraduate.
1. From the App Launcher, find and select Educational Characteristic Types.
2. Click New, and enter a name and description.
3. Save your changes.
4. Repeat these steps for each educational characteristic type that you want to create.
5. (Optional) Assign each educational characteristic type a parent type.
Create identity-based educational characteristics, such as senior, first-generation, athlete, or English major.

Each characteristic has an associated type. For example, senior is a characteristic of the Academic Profile type.
1. From the App Launcher, find and select Educational Characteristics.
2. Click New, and enter a name and description.
3. Assign an educational characteristic type, and make it active.
  Only active educational characteristics are available for assignment to students.
4. Make the educational characteristic visible to students in the Course Search and Registration portal.
5. Save your changes.
6. Repeat these steps for each educational characteristic that you want to create.
Assign educational characteristics to students.
1. From the App Launcher, find and select Educational Characteristic Assignments.
2. Click New.
3. Select a student account, and select a student in the account.
4. Assign the student an educational characteristic.
5. Assign a predefined academic internal, or specify a date range.
  
  An educational characteristic assignment is valid only in the specified time frame. The time-bound assignments help you track a student’s history. For example, a student had an Athlete attribute in Fall 2024 but no longer has that attribute in Spring 2025.
  Note
  
  If you don’t specify an end date for a date range, the assignment remains active indefinitely.
  
  Make sure that the date range completely overlaps with the academic session, term, or year of a course offering. Otherwise, the student loses their eligibility to register for a course offering in that year, term, or session. For example, the Spring 2026 term runs from January 1 to April 30, 2026. If you apply a date range of January 2 to April 30, 2026, the student is ineligible for the Spring 2026 term registration.
  
  For the same student, the date range of one assignment record can’t fall within the date range of another record. For example, Assignment A has a date range of December 1, 2025 to January 1, 2026. If Assignment B has a date range of December 3, 2025 to January 1, 2026, Assignment B causes an error.
6. Save your changes.
7. Repeat these steps for each educational characteristic that you want to assign.

We recommend that you create an automation to make assignments. For example, use Apex classes or a flow to assign educational characteristics automatically when a student declares their major.