@4kids4us – in Naviance, you can find the info you seek in three places: under college match, acceptance history, and scattergrams. The scattergrams are good for comparing your child’s statistics (GPA, test scores) to those of students from his high school who were accepted, waitlisted, and rejected. Search by name of college.
Naviance is a cool tool, but I am not sure how reliable it is. One reason for my doubt is that many top colleges have become much more selective recently, so even data from 2011 is old. The second reason is specific to our situation, although others on this site may have a similar situation. At my son’s school with about 300 students per class, very few apply to small liberal arts colleges, so the samples are too small to be a good guide for the small schools that interest my son-- although he can get a better predictor for some larger schools of interest. For example, since 2011, 738 kids from his school applied to Binghamton, but only 4 applied to Bates.
@TheGreyKing, I wonder if I’m logged in to the wrong thing. On the h.s. website, there is a link for Naviance Family Connection. I’m logged in with my daughter’s username and password. I’m then on a homepage that says “welcome to Naviance…” At the top are two tabs, one says “Colleges” and the other “About Me” then down the left are various links. There is nothing anywhere that says “college match” “acceptance history” or “scattergrams.” When I click on the “colleges” tab, it then has another link for “colleges I’m applying to” - when cIick on that, it shows all the colleges my daughter applied to, and then sort of a check off list for each school that shows the type of application, when it was submitted, whether she was accepted, etc. I’ve clicked all around the site and cannot find any of the things you mention - however, I DID see that information at some point. I know I saw scattergrams, etc somewhere for her high school b/c during the admissions process, I looked at it for the schools she was applying to. But now I can’t find it anywhere - I’ve got to wonder if I’m logged in to the wrong thing? There is no other link for Naviance on the school’s website. Perhaps my daughter will know but she’s at work until late tonight. Just annoyed that I know I saw it before and now can’t find it.
Up-Loyola Marymount. My D is Jewish and felt that while a lovely campus, was too catholic looking and feeling for her. I was expecting the same thing at LMU. But other than the Jesuit philosophy, which aligns with hers, it didn’t seem religious. Our tour guide was nerdy in the best possible way and seemed like someone my D would be friends with. I thought the campus was beautiful and was more diverse than I was expecting.
Again, it depends on how much data your school collects, but for us the Naviance data is FAR more accurate than using the school’s website for national stats or any analog to that. The national stats would probably be meaningful if your school was very near the national mean. But many schools are either materially above or below it. Thus why our school specific acceptance rate for Rutgers is way above their national stat, but the acceptance rate for some very selective schools is well below the average (because so many competitive kids from their school apply making the school-specific competition harder than the national average). Similarly, as others have noted there are certain schools that are weird aberations where they should be easier to get into than they are and they line up with the popular “safeties” at the school.
Again, I’m one of these research junkies and reviewed and collected a lot of data from many sites before my oldest went to college and then reviewed how it faired after his and his closest peers acceptances. And Naviance was basically spot on. This was consistent with what local parents of older kids had told us to, to trust Naviance. With my oldest, who was way above the mean on leadership EC’s, you could basically give him a 0.15 weighted GPA bump over whatever the average acceptance dataset was for his school in Naviance and perfectly predict where he was accepted. We knew his EC’s would be a bump and if I had predicted beforehand I would have guessed at least 0.1, so it wasn’t far off. The net result is by using Naviance to determine what was Reach vs. Match vs. Safety, he got into all his Matches and Safeties and a couple of the nearer Reaches.
Mileage will vary dramatically from school to school depending on the size of the school, how good the school is at getting full participation in the data (our school is excellent at that – it’s basically compulsory), how many years of recent data and whether the schools you are looking at our common choices or unusual for your school. But for schools with good data, it would be a mistake to dismiss it as no better than the national stats. Orders of magnitude better for some.
@TheGreyKing I’m really surprised your school uses data as old as 2011. My kids’ school only used the past 3 years of data for the reason you state - the admissions landscape changes so fast, that older data isn’t helpful or accurate.
Each high school can tailor what is shown on their naviance so what someone else can see might be different from what you can see.
@4kids4us 1) Individual schools can turn certain features on and off for different users. Our school doesn’t even let students have access to selecting schools they may apply to until the start of Junior year and it turned off most of the data for our eldest son a few weeks after graduation. No idea if that’s happening in your case. 2) Try clicking on one of the colleges in her list or using the search feature to find another college. Once you do there should be a list of horizontal menu options across near the top. What I see across are: “Overview Studies Student Life Admissions Costs” Admissions is where all the real data is, including scattergrams, unless your school has disabled that feature.
@citivas I just looked around again and am going to assume they shut off access to that data sometime this summer. As far as clicking on one of the colleges on her list, there is nothing to “click” - it’s more of a list of her colleges and a list of “to do” items with dates that they were submitted. At least I know that I’m not crazy and that I did see it at one point, but sounds like the school just turned it off after the kids graduated.
Y’all may want to make a Naviance thread rather than derail this one so others who may be interested can find it. Buried in an unrelated thread makes it less beneficial .
@carolinamom2boys , yep, sorry! I actually thought this discussion was in a different thread I’ve also been reading where it would have been more on topic - didn’t mean to derail this one.
UVA was gorgeous. We both loved the campus. Unfortunately, when we visited it was very hot and humid. My kids described it as a “hot oven with flies”. Sadly that is our lasting impression of it.
@exlibris97 So many kids’ impressions are affected by the weather! I have a few schools that I really want S19 to like so I’m making sure we see them in the fall and not in the winter when the trees will be bare and the sidewalks icy! :))
@4kids4us - while carolina mom is probably right, here is a quick answer to your question.
Log in.
There are 3 tabs at the top (colleges, careers, about me). Click on “colleges.”
Next look in the second category down- “college research.”
Now you can click on “scattergrams” or whatever else you like.
You can never tell what the trigger is going to be, do a couple test runs on universities that you don’t really care about first! So you can learn what factors to mitigate for schools you want to come out on top!
We saw Marquette (Milwaukee, WI) on was a particularly cold/miserable February weekend. DD’16 came away from the weekend in love and is about to start her sophomore year there. DD’18 just saw College of Charleston at the end of a 5 school tour . She was suffering from school visit fatigue by that point and what should have been a slam dunk came out as just “meh”. On that same tour hubby hated Auburn because he was hot, sweaty and felt like he was “baking in a brick oven”. We have also found that the drive to/approach to the school makes a BIG difference for DD’18. Sometimes Google maps takes you the most convoluted way and that never makes a good impression, lol!
@labegg We have also found that the drive to/approach to the school makes a BIG difference for DD’18
That’s an understatement. Saw some schools in the Baltimore area and google maps took us the shortest way, but also the way where we went thru some neighborhoods with speeding police cars and cops jumping out of cars to make arrests. At Trinity, the directions they provide on-line, take you the ‘nice’ way’ vs what you may get on google maps.
We approached U of Chicago from the west and S19 got a taste of that neighborhood. And, yes, it would have been completely different had we come from Lake Shore Drive!
It is not so much the “nice way” for DD as it is some schools seem like they are in the middle of nowhere. Google tries to avoid traffic, I think DD feels traffic is a sign that people actually want to be there, lol!.