<p>We had a meeting with the school college counselor but there was no mention about any naviance system. </p>
<p>We have no idea where our junior kid is standing, and what chances does he have in applying certain schools.</p>
<p>No, but more and more seem to have it. Ask directly and, while you’re at it, ask to see the school’s profile that they send to colleges. It may give you an idea of where he stands.</p>
<p>There was no mention about school profile either.
I feel like we are on our own.</p>
<p>Not every high school subscribes to Naviance. (There is a cost involved for the school to do so.) But whether or not your school has Naviance, your school’s college counselor should be able to provide the same basic information: your student’s class rank, how successful students with stats similar to your son’s have been at getting into those particular schools (if any have applied previously), what colleges might be a good match for your son, etc.</p>
<p>You can also get a good idea of your son’s chances by researching the individual schools on-line or in various publications like USN&WR, Princeton Review, Fiske’s Guide, etc. Most schools provide data on test scores and GPA for their freshman class on their websites. Many schools even publish their Common Data Sets, which provide a wealth of info. You can also look here on CC to see what kind of stats are likely to bring acceptances or rejections at certain schools – and to get advice/feedback from many frequent posters who have a great deal of knowledge about college admissions (adults, not students).</p>
<p>Forget about what is “mentioned.” You need to be pro-active and ask the guidance counselor directly for the info you want. For example, there has to be some sort of school profile available, since that is what the counselor normally sends in as part of the student’s college application.</p>
<p>If your school doesn’t have Naviance, try looking at the webpages of other local comparable schools to see if they do, and allow you to view it. For example, our high school allows anyone who visits its website to view its Naviance stats as a guest. One friend of ours from another district used our Naviance more than his own to gauge admittance stats and trends for different colleges, because his high school was very small, and accordingly, had too little Naviance data to allow for meaningful comparisons.</p>
<p>“… how successful students with stats similar to your son’s have been at getting into those particular schools…”.</p>
<p>That is exactly what we want to know. Should we ask the counselor?</p>
<p>Your school profile will give you a good idea of how your son compares to his classmates and his counselor should have a good sense of how he compares to students who have applied to certain colleges from your high school in the past. In many large public schools it is up to the student/parent to contact the counselor with questions. Make an appointment with your son’s counselor. Encourage him to sign up to meet with his counselor as needed - don’t wait to be called in for a senior interview. If you are proactive I think you will find that you get good service from your school counselor but you need to be the initiator of contact because they have huge caseloads.</p>
<p>If your school offers a college and career center you can get a lot of information and assistance from that person on a more “walk in” basis. With budget cuts such centers are becoming a luxury some places but they really help take the sting out of the large counselor loads.</p>
<p>If your son has specific areas of interest get a current copy of Rugg’s Recommendations on the Colleges to see a variety of schools that have strong programs in that particular area. A less popular school may have a strong program in his area of interest and be more likely to offer him merit money based on his higher standing in their overall pool of applicants.</p>
<p>noidea we don’t have it either and none of the other schools in our county do. As far as the school profile that is mandated and it should be available by request. </p>
<p>Bring your questions here if your GC doesn’t have the time and inclination to respond. </p>
<p>Best of Luck</p>
<p>School profiles aren’t mandated, or at least not in my state. My school refused to write one. I mean, we have none, I asked for one, and they said emphatically, “NO.” The GC told me they were a waste of time, no colleges looked at them, and the HS was not preparing one.</p>
<p>Yeah, as you guessed, they were lots 
of help. Definitely no Naviance either.</p>
<p>Nope - we do not have Naviance. Only a portion of our HS even goes to college, and the vast majority go to public in-state institutions.</p>
<p>If your school doesn’t have Naviance (and you can ask just to be sure), then ask for your school’s secondary school profile, and ask if your counselor has any statistics on where students like your son have gone in the past. Also, do your own research (or have your son do it), sometimes spending quality time with one of the huge college guide books like the Fiske Guide to Colleges or something similar can help give you at least an idea. They offer a profile of each school, with the key data points, and usually divide the schools up by state (sometimes even if your kid has no idea what they want, they know where they’d like to live). It’s not a fool-proof system, but it allows you to see how you stack up against hte school’s average applicant and gives you a wide knowledge base to start out with. I prefer Fiske or almost any other guide to Princeton Review (I think PR is overrated and light on actual useful facts). You can usually find a whole section of these college guides in your local Barnes and Noble, so grab a coffee and your kid and settle down for an afternoon of browsing. Bring a notebook to take notes and follow up on your thoughts with the counselor (“We read about X school in the Fiske Guide, it sounds really intriguing. Do you think it’s a good fit for my kid? Are there any colleges you know of that are similar to it that we should/could be looking at?”)</p>
<p>sorry, I should have qualified. The school profile is mandated in public schools in CA. Sorry for being geocentric :)</p>
<p>All of the schools around here–not CA–have profiles online. Try going to your high school or district’s web site, navigate to the Guidance area, and look for School Profile. </p>
<p>I’d be surprised if you didn’t find it.</p>
<p>We don’t have Naviance.</p>
<p>We don’t have a school profile on line. I do know that many schools that don’t have Naviance, do keep similar data in a spreadsheet. Really, you just want to get a handle on how colleges look at GPA’s from your school. We were pleasantly surprised with both what the GC recommended as matches and how it all turned out.</p>
<p>OP- your district will have an employee (in a small district it will be the superintendent of schools. In a large district it will be “head of research” or “deputy superintendent”) whose responsibility it is to prepare a summary of statistical information. Districts get reimbursed by both the state and federal governments, and it is based on various metrics.</p>
<p>Your GC may not have a copy sitting on the desk marked “school profile” but for sure it exists. At a minimum, your district is required to track the number of kids receiving free lunches (that’s another federal level entitlement) which is useful to college admissions officers as a proxy for the level of economic diversity (or the lack thereof) in your community.</p>
<p>OK, help me out here. I was surprised to read that schools have Profiles on line. So I signed in to our local HS site and WOW, there was a listing for it on the Guidance web page. Click. Nothing. HA, silly me … thinking that because it was listed that the Profile would actually be there.</p>
<p>But I have a more relevant question. Is Naviance the same as TCCi Family Connection? My understanding was that Naviance showed where students from your student’s school applied and whether they were accepted. The HS web site suggests that TCCi Family Connection plots a global data set … rather than data from your local HS. Does anyone know for sure?</p>
<p>The Naviance logon page for my S’s school says Family Connection. Not sure what TCCi is though.</p>
<p>^ mamom - does the Family Connection site have information on just your S’s school, or for other high schools also?</p>
<p>Our HS just instituted it this year.</p>