i agree and resemble that remark! - naviance didnt help us at all in a similar situation. This site did a ton.
i just encourage to you look at prices for sure as well.
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Have you considered hiring a college planner. Ours was worth every penny spent.
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I recommend you get your hands on a couple of good college guide books (ex. Fiske, Princeton Review, Insiders Guide) and start reading.
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Our school didn’t have Naviance and the GC was useless. Many didn’t go to college.
We started by thinking about cost/aid (financial and merit), size, location (including weather), academics, extracurriculars and “vibe.” We visited one large state university, one small liberal arts college, and one sort of alternative artsy one- just to show the types of schools out there.
Loren Pope wrote “Colleges that Change Lives,” the book and as someone above mentioned it is now a website (and national fairs, before COVID). Pope also wrote “Looking Beyond the Ivy League” (google it). He wrote it in 2007 but it is still available and gives a good overview of colleges, even though it is pretty old at this point.
The Colleges that Change Lives is a helpful website. We really liked Clark an there are some other good ones.
State university honors programs are often a good option. See if there are any exchange programs with other states where the tuition is in-state or look into merit offers.
Your son could aim high from what you have written, and he comes from Montana. Some Ivy League schools have amazing financial aid, too. Don’t discount them. Also google “Little Ivies.” schools like Tufts, Amherst. Williams, Bowdoin, Bates, Middlebury, and a few others.
You can do this. We felt lost too but all three of our kids ended up at great schools in the end.
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You have come to the right place! Lots of parents with recent experience on here.
The fact that your son has high stats and is applying from Montana is a big deal. He’s competitive for all the Ivys, whereas if he were coming from Greenwich CT or Newton MA or Great Neck, NY, the schools would go, “And what national or international achievement does he have?”
People who have gotten a look at their admissions files after they got into top Ivy schools have literally seen comments written in the margin by admissions committee members saying, “He checks the South Dakota box”. So the fact that he is applying from Montana is GREAT.
What does your son want to study? What part of the country would he like to be in? Does he want a big state school? Does he want an elite highly selective school? He has a shot at them. Talk with him about what he wants, He has a decent chance anywhere, except maybe certain select schools, like MIT, if his interests don’t match what they offer.
My kid’s college selection process was guided by which schools had what he wanted to study (instrumental performance unless he got into the one Ivy which he felt was a match for him, and in that case, psychology). Because his interest was so specific, that narrowed the field. Other considerations were co-religionists (we’re a religious minority), and the ability to do both academics and music easily. That really narrowed the field.
My other kid needed a specific major that most colleges don’t have big departments in, if they have it at all, plus there were issues that made us want to keep kid within 4 hr drive. Plus we didn’t want to pay 70K/yr! That REALLY narrowed the field.
Your son’s academic interests, and preferences as regards location, size, public vs private, and your need/eligibility for financial aid are the first place to start. Then go ahead and post here, asking for suggestions for a kid who wants what he wants. You’ll get a ton of suggestions, more info than you can digest.
Assuming you can pay, he could probably go anywhere. Assuming you need some financial aid, he can probably get into a highly ranked school with generous aid. Assuming you don’t qualify for any fin aid, but want him to get a merit scholarship, he probably could get merit money from a 2nd tier institution.
Neither of my kids used Naviance to select schools.
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I’m with the group that feels you need to start by looking at costs - not for any one specific college, but overall. Can you pay 80K per year for the school of choice? If not - or if you don’t want to - then you want to look at schools with cost in mind. Pretty much every family I talk with has cost in mind, so you aren’t alone.
If you need to consider finances, you’re in a decent position because your son has high stats and sports(?). That can open doors. As others have said, coming from MT is a plus if he is ok going to school far from home.
Get on a FAFSA forecaster (free) and run your real numbers. If you’re ok with what you see at the end, great, because with high stats you can likely find a good school (or several) that will come down to that number. If you feel faint and end up picking yourself up off the floor after seeing that number, then you’re going to likely want to chase merit aid (although at the very top schools - some Ivies, etc, the number can be lower).
If you report back here letting us know you’re looking for need based aid or merit aid (or maybe sports scholarships) and let us know what sort of path you think your son wants at the end (engineer? doctor? teacher? business?) this forum can come up with a lot of places for you both to consider.
Best wishes to you on this journey. It can actually be quite fun - though nerve wracking also comes to mind - both on the same journey. 
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try oszlist.com! i used a combination of that and naviance
Maybe at some, but Yale has a podcast where they talked about the admissions process, and they said it really does not play much of a role in decisions. What will help is OP’s son being ranked 2nd in his class and having the most rigorous course schedule
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What’s Naviance ?
What does your son want to study ?
P.S. Just kidding about my first question. My point is that Naviance has almost zero significance in your son’s situation.
P.P.S. Once your son has an actual SAT or ACT score, then he can start his college hunt based on what he wants to study & what activities are important to him–such as playing in sports or being in a future investment bankers club (think the University of Michigan Ross School of Business or Penn-Wharton).
If you son wants to be an engineer or an architect, then he will have narrowed his list of target schools considerably.
Because your son has outstanding grades, high class rank, plays 3 sports, and is likely to do very well on standardized tests, then COA becomes less important as the most selective colleges & universities typically offer the most generous need based financial aid.
If you cannot qualify for need based financial aid and are not wealthy, then affordability becomes a main consideration.
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Thank you. We will definitely need aid and I did a fafsa estimator. Definitely don’t have 80k 
. Ideally he would get into a school that meets 100% need or close. He is the oldest of 4 so I feel like I’ll be on here awhile, hopefully learning enough that I can pay it forward.
Part of the problem is him not knowing what he wants and not being helpful in narrowing things down. I thought if there was some way to narrow it down via a naviance like program it might be better. He cannot decide what he wants to do and where he wants to go. He is very competitive and driven but I don’t think he looks past tomorrow (I guess pretty normal for a teen). He is a very young junior w bday by the cutoff and he is still 16 for awhile. It’s hard to get him to be serious.
He isn’t good enough for athletic scholarship material. He could probably walk on at a D3 xc team if he wanted. He has gone to state but isn’t the top runner on his team. JV bball this year and he did pretty well. He is about to start track which was canceled last year.
I’m so thankful for all of these helpful replies. I’m going to look into all of these resources.
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There are so many ways to start, and so much information out there. Sometimes kids are flexible on size of school and location, which seem to be the most common places to start. My kid was open on those, so I started with some of the lists that I thought were interesting. There are so many lists. I looked at lists for happiest students, beautiful campuses, and best dorms. Also there was a book Colleges that Create Futures that listed some unique features of schools that were diverse in terms of size and location. Once you start to find some schools that might be interesting, you can also search “colleges like …” so see what might be similar. The good thing is that now there are so many videos and info sessions on line so you can get a good idea without having to visit. Best of luck!
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I have a lot to think about in giving him some direction. Thank you.
I guess we’ll have a score to work with in a few weeks and see if he needs to keep testing. He got 206 (98%) on PSAT, so unless MT has pretty low SI, I think national merit is out of the question. He slacked on prep for that and just got serious about it after he took it.
After the fact, I found out the school is administering ACT with writing on the 23rd too. So we’ll have some real scores to work with.
Is the podcast worth a listen? I feel like it’s a reach at any of these schools no matter what, we just need some direction on where to start and I know I’m late to the game. He is doing his part on the grades and literally takes the hardest classes for fun. I need to get this process down.
I would love to have a consultant take over and wake up in a year with him all set 
You are NOT late to the game! Next October is late to the game. If he doesn’t know what he wants to study, then I would encourage you to consider leading large public flagship universities and Ivies and other top 20 private Universities because they are likely to have many majors. That way, as he finds what he likes, they are very likely to have a strong department in whatever he’s interested in.
In terms of money, well-endowed leading private universities are likely to meet full financial need - but that’s NEED, not want. If you wouldn’t qualify for aid, but want full tuition, or even a full ride, he’s going to have to look at schools where his stats place him way above the usual admitted students.
What about area of the country? Does he want to stay in the West? Is he willing to go anywhere in the US? Does he want urban, suburban, or rural?
What do each of his parents do? That can sometimes predict a person’s interests and future field of study.
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We are going to have to start doing more of the virtual stuff. He gets email invites to a lot of schools to do this. He is so focused on his school work(AP Physics,AP Eng, AP US Hist and AP Calc), test prep and sports. I’m going to have to get him to make the time.
I don’t know if we are going to be able to see that many in person schools. He did TIP on campus at Duke a few years ago (they gave very good financial aid) and loved it, but that is the only campus he knows. He did CTD at Northwestern (he was only 10) before we moved to MT. Those are the only campuses he has seen.
He would get need based aid. The amount on the fafsa example is barely doable. We are able to pay most of the amount out of pocket and he will have to do work study or loans for the rest.
He is seriously open to anything. Either coast, not too big (although he would consider an honors college within a big university), but not too small. I don’t even think he has an opinion on rural vs urban or the weather. 
I ask him a lot of these questions and it is getting frustrating to the point that my husband was like “pick something for him and drop him off” lol. He is so easygoing and loves trying different things and going different places. He would probably be happy anywhere learning about anything. I guess that is why it’s so hard to narrow down.
We are in Montana. Even though we are in the big “city” here, it seems like everyone knows everyone and I was a little nervous about posting.
Thank you for the great info. And I hadn’t even thought of Canada. I guess I was thinking naviance was something that could help him narrow things down and didn’t know what tools to use besides that.
Just listened to it. They specifically talk about this website and location myths. Interesting.