Do kids self-report their college acceptance decisions to Naviance? If so, how do they know if a student is being truthful? Could there be false positives? Do the guidance counselors check to see what the student entered? Between not identifying recruited athletes, exceptional extracurriculars, underrepresented populations, or legacy status, Naviance’s guidance seems like a very weak tool.
@BostonKnows I"m assuming they don’t, my kid has colleges that she did not apply to but we can’t remove; we also can’t even fill in where accepted. So at least for our school the kids/parents can’t change info on naviance. It’s possible different school districts do it different though
Interesting that the study shows it nudges kids to apply to the same schools. For us it was the opposite. Kid applied ED to the popular college, but plan was to apply RD to some schools that were off the radar for other kids in her HS. We figured less in-school competition was better, and that colleges would be able to assess the strength of her education by her AP and SAT2 scores.
Other than looking at Naviance for this, we didn’t find it helpful because of holistic Admissions and the whole issue of ED, legacy, URM, athletic recruit, and special skills/talents.
I just read the whole paper. Really nicely done! Way more and more nuanced conclusions than I was able to summarize above from the twitter thread. Recommended reading! There are some interesting differences in whether Naviance serves to expand or constrict the perceived “field of choice” of possible colleges. It also really makes a difference if a college is just below vs. just over the “visible” threshold for scattergrams. One effect for low-income students in particular is that Naviance can increase the visibility of low-cost in-state 4-year public options among kids who might only be considering community college.