An Entire Thread on Naviance and Prep Schools

By popular demand.

To start it off, we found Naviance helpful. For small prep schools, though, some of the entries would be blocked, as too few students had applied. This measure protected the privacy of the students whose results were in the database. As it was, our kids could take pretty good guesses at which students were the most anomalous outcomes. “Oh, that must be ____, who was recruited for (sport).”

It was much better than looking at lists of matriculation outcomes, though, as there are so many factors which can play into results. I did not spend much time on the site, though. Others may know more. I was interested to find the features which gave links to lists such as the list of colleges with the largest number of enrolled graduates, the map which showed where graduates were enrolled, the ability to compare outcomes for particular colleges for ED vs. RD, etc.

In general, the schools had a much better admission rates at selective colleges than the colleges’ respective published rates. However, there was no way to know how much hooks like legacy, athletic talent, underrepresented minority status, development status, musical talent, sheer genius, etc, influenced the results.

The list of college reps visiting campus was useful, as it allowed my kids to put them into their schedules.

By the time students have access to Naviance, they are in the most stressful time in high school. My children did not play around with the site for fun; they did turn to it when the college counselors had set deadlines, such as, “need a list of possible colleges by next Monday.”

We received parent account for Naviance just after winter break for DD who is a junior at Cate. DD has only taken the ACT so far. It was interesting to me that there are substantially fewer data points on the scattergram when you plug in ACT score vs SAT score. Obviously, Cate students have historically focused on the SAT exam. Just curious if anyone knows if the SAT is more prevalent on the West Coast or California? I was surprised because in our area it is balanced between the two exams. It could be specific to Cate as they have been a testing center for the SAT but not the ACT (although they are working to become one). I love having the historical data from your own school. Obviously, there are a lot of factors that you can’t know when you look at specific “points”, but it is nice to get an overall sense of the admission trends.

We had a very interesting experience with Naviance. One daughter attended a small all girls’ school and the other daughter attended a co-ed large boarding school. Ironically, the small school allowed access to many more tools on Naviance than the large school- and in some ways this was very helpful. In other ways, as you already pointed out, they couldn’t reveal recent history in order to retain anonymity- this is where the larger school’s Naviance was helpful. Both schools had a poor ACT history, although I could see it filling in more last year. One school gave us access to Naviance Junior year and the other Sophomore year (small school). I found early access helped because we could predict SATs based on PSATs and National Merit and which colleges to plan on visiting, etc…

It would be nice if “like” school pooled their results. Perhaps they could add that as an option if smaller schools agreed to the arrangement.

I played around with Naviance a bit for fun and, like @Periwinkle’s kids, our son did what was required by his GC and no more. The tool is useless for kids applying to service academies as it doesn’t capture the relevant components of that process and so few BS apply that the academic data points aren’t very meaningful.

One thing I found Naviance helpful for was looking at which schools seemed more holistic in their admissions and which were more quantitative, focused on GPA/test scores. Looking at the graphs it was fairly easy to tell. It was also helpful for help in finding safer schools for my children’s lists. There were a few schools that LOVED grads from my kids’ school and the acceptance rate was much higher than the national acceptance rate or that published admissions stats suggested. It helped pinpoint a very solid choice or two that might not be typically viewed as a safety school.

I would state though that the rapidly changing admissions landscape can make any data for a particular school unpredictable. My kids’ school used the 3 previous years of data on Naviance so some of the data is 4 years old by the time your cild applies. Some colleges have seen their admissions percentiles cut in half over that 4 year period.

We found it really helpful. There were a number of things about my son’s school that made its data different from the general applicant pool (not the least of which is that there is no weighting of grades and most of the teachers are comfortable using most of the letters!), so it was reassuring to see that regardless of what was on a college website about GPA, for example, pretty much everyone with a 3.0 or above from DS’s school had been accepted at XYZ school. As @Periwinkle noted, we too wished that you could hover over each dot and have a few more things about that person show up, such as “performed at Carnegie Hall at 15” or “URM” or “legacy”, but the kids have a pretty good sense of these outliers for the year or two ahead of them anyway. Our CC was able to add all the color we needed and was remarkably helpful throughout. I think that most of all, Naviance took a bit of the burden off her as we were able to do some of the basic work there and rely on her expertise, rather than data. We received access around the middle of junior year. There have also been things that were not communicated to us by DS (such as “I decided not to apply to ABC”) that we’ve learned through Naviance; we can know what’s going on without him feeling like we’re constantly bugging him.

Forgot to mention that I like that there is a listing of recent Cate grads and contact info for them at their respective schools. Not sure if DD will utilize the resource, but it might be helpful to have a contact if you have questions about a particular school.

At least for 7D1’s college search/application cycle, SAS did not give parents access to Naviance scattergrams…their take on it being “without a CC to explain various datapoint (including outliers), the maps could be misinterpreted”. They were willing to review maps in person on campus…we never took CC up on that offer.

@doschicos, how could you tell from the graphs if a school was less focused on metrics like GPA/test scores? I’m thinking it would be schools that had a wider range of acceptances, as opposed to a school where all acceptances were more closely huddled around the intersection of the average accepted GPA/SAT. Is that what you have in mind? Or now that I think about it, maybe for these purposes rejection are more relevant – if a school rejects a number of kids with metrics above the average acceptance point, then I guess that tells you that they’re looking at more than just the numbers.

@soxmom From my experience, there were a few schools where acceptances were tightly clustered above certain GPA/score ranges, even vs. schools of similar caliber/acceptance ranges, at least for my kids’ schools. One example was Princeton. Even looking at other Ivies like Harvard/Yale, Princeton acceptances were in the very tippy top upper right hand corner. There weren’t outliers which you could find when looking at H, Y, Columbia, Stanford, and others in that cohort. Another one I remember was Georgetown, where acceptances were all bunched above a certain “cutoff”. At least that was the experience for my kids’ school at the time. Some colleges, it was much harder to see patterns or there were plenty of outliers.

Thanks, @doschicos. I’d noticed the same thing about Princeton too. It fits with my theory (yes, I know I’m generalizing wildly) that Princeton is more interested in kids who are above average in all respects, but not necessarily a star in any one thing, whereas Harvard is more interested in the kid who debuted at Carnegie Hall at age 9 or has some other identifiable “prodigy” aspect to their application.

One thing I inferred from talks to CC is that for highly selective schools, the admitted with below the average GPA and SAT of all admitted are almost invariably kids with big hooks - recruited athletes and URMs in particular. In my kid’s school, Princeton, as others noted, is most stats driven. Yale is right after in that respect. Harvard is more holistic considering its selectivity (still very high stats are required) and Columbia is even more so. Georgetown is more “predictable”, with almost all reaching certain threshold getting admitted. The mid western schools are significantly easier with the exception of Chicago, which has been getting harder to get in in recent years. Note though that even PY seem to be more stats driven, the application review process is pretty thorough. They WILL look closely into the trascirpts so don’t expect to get away with easy classes and good grades. And the more selective the college, the more necessary that you have something “extra” (be it a legacy status, Stella EC, major awards) to stand out from the crowd.

Interesting note, @bsalum, about your two kids’ different experiences. GG attends a 350-ish student all girls school and they post recent data. Interestingly, they do not rank GPA or class rank for any current student, but they do keep track, and the data from the previous year (in addition to further back) does appear on Naviance. We found it very useful.

As @ChoatieMom noted, it’s not of any use for the service academies. I will add from experience that it’s also not helpful for music schools or conservatories. It does have a lot of fine arts schools, and, for those looking at foreign schools, they’re on Naviance.

Whether your school has detailed statistics on a particular school your dc is considering will be entirely dependent on whether anyone from your dc’s school has applied in the past N years (I just logged into Naviance and double checked that)—but you can see general statistical information like number of applicants/acceptances in recent years.

As for scattergraphs, yeah. I didn’t know about them till we sat down with GG’s CC and she showed us on her Naviance screen.

Since the thread that launched the Naviance discussion talked a lot about the Parent Essay—in Naviance called the Parent Questionnaire. I just wanted to add something I didn’t really see there. In big schools especially, a combination of teacher input and the PE may be the only way a student’s CC will get to “know” them as other than a statistic. If there are major life events that affected your child’s school career, the PQ is the place to discuss them. Students don’t have access to the PQ, so you can really have at it. Even in small schools, a new CC, for example, won’t have much knowledge of a particular student; i.e. if their first year is the student’s senior year, it behooves you to give them as much relevant background as you can.

For those new to Naviance, if your school uses it I’ll also chime in that, in addition to the data-driven information system that is used within the school community, it functions externally similarly to the Common App for providing data to colleges to which your student is applying: e.g. school college counseling offices will upload quarterly and midyear grades to both Naviance and CA, and U.S. post-secondary institutions that subscribe to one system or another can access them — saving secondary schools a LOT of uploading, and insuring quick access to time-sensitive (for institutions’ decision-making purposes) information.

For those whose kids use or will be using Naviance and will be applying to any foreign schools, including those in Canada, be aware that they may have different requirements for receiving transcripts and other documentation, and that your student may have a more direct/hands-on experience applying to these schools.

where can I find out more on Naviance? I looked at the website and it seems the schools are the customers? Is it a service where kids put in their stats and the colleges they ultimately decide to attend? Is it a means of submitting applications also?

Is there any way to look at the colleges typically attended by high school? Thanks

If they subscribe to it and give the info out to students and parents (not all schools do), in your child’s junior year (sophomore in some cases mentioned here) your kid’s college counseling office will pass along access to the Naviance website. My experience is that college applications are submitted through the CommonApp (some exceptions include Georgetown, some foreign universities). Naviance is used to look at admissions results from students at your school, a way of communication between the counselor and student, a way for the student to manage their college list, a way for the high school to submit transcripts to colleges.

D’s boarding school was meticulous about entering data on Naviance and we had data covering the previous 4 years. We found it very helpful in crafting our list of matches and safety schools and somewhat helpful for her reach schools. Not all boarding schools are as meticulous in maintaining the data so YMMV.

The scattergrams were useful to her in determining whether a particular school was a safety/match. If she could determine that a school had rejected no one from her particular school with her stats in the last 4 years, then that is a pretty good indication of a safety. Sure, she could be the first rejection, but that’s why your final list has at least 2 or 3 safety schools.

We also found the scattergrams helpful in managing expectations for D’s first choice school where she had decided to apply early. The data was clear about the percentage of the applicants accepted with her stats from her school in the last 4 years. So while we left the decision up to her, she pretty much knew going in what she was up against. It worked out well for her in the end, but as parents we felt better knowing that she saw the data and presumably had no misconceptions about her chances. She was also educated about “holistic” admissions by her college counselor.

Our Naviance data also included a breakdown of how many students were accepted by each school and then whether they matriculated or not. So from that data we could definitely see that there were a handful of schools that really had a strong relationship with her school. Year are year you could see 20 or 25 acceptances and even if only 20% of those matriculated each year, the same number of acceptances in subsequent years. So those schools might have gotten an extra “look” when putting together the final list.

While it has it’s limitations, we found it very useful. My second child’s school does not have Naviance at all. Thankfully it is a VERY small school. When we lamented to his college counselor about not having some data points, he pointed to his head and said “it’s all here.” So presumably we will get some guidance in that regard anyway.

The CC has a very different view into Naviance than we do as parents. They have access to the full set of demographic data.

I liked Naviance as it gave me window into the process. I’m sure no one will be shocked by my statement that teenage boys away at boarding school don’t always do a good job of communicating with their parents. Naviance let me see which schools he was targeting, it let me see the CC’s assessment of his changes at that school, and let me have access to the scattergrams. Some of the scattergrams results were really enlightening. One that stood out was the best students at DS1s school simply did not get into Claremont McKenna except as ED. Essentially Claremont McKenna decided to many students were using it as a safety school and they were protecting their yield.

If there was anything Naviance showed me it was how muck college admissions felt like a lottery. You look at the scattergram and there are lots of kids below and to the left of your child that were admitted and there were some above and to the right that were denied. That is why I called the scattergrams torture devices. When your child struggles with the process you look at the scattergrams and wonder what the heck is going on. In the end it all worked out for my kid but it was brutal.

Naviance has a lot of “noise”. As mentioned earlier, consider those green dots below average outliers if you are not a recruited athlete or have a “huge hook”. The seeming randomness among the dots above average is what you should focus on. This is where CC can help. They can give you a number of factors that may contribute to an acceptance or a rejection once a candidate reaches a certain threshold in stats.