How accurate was Naviance for you this year?

Hi everyone,

When D1 went through this process 3 years ago, our school’s Naviance was an excellent predictor of results for us and for all the families I know. There was some disappointment, but no outright shocks. Matches behaved like matches and reaches, like reaches. Kids got accepted and rejected at basically the schools that they expected. I was wondering how well it performed in this cycle. How well did Naviance work as a predictor for this particular cycle?

Poorly - it couldn’t predict waitlists! Naviance indicated my son should have been accepted to two schools he was waitlisted for (I guess they would be considered “match” schools as he was firmly in the 60th percentile of all stats). Of course it was correct for the safety although there was no mechanism for it to determine the chance of acceptance to the Honors college there. It was correct for the reach school (a no). I think waitlists will need to be a new set of data that needs to be tracked in the software.

doesnt intergrate with coalition app at all. They need to ass the coalition app as an option

Our Naviance does track waitlisted students. We can see admits, ED, and waitlisted.

I agree with the waitlist issue.

Honestly, it wasn’t super helpful for us. Most kids in son’s school go to in-state public’s so there enough sample for the ones Son was looking at. The public schools were also very different this year. I’m sure those weren’t issues other schools might have had.

It was mostly accurate from what we experienced with some exceptions - U. of Michigan and Case Western data was way off.

Naviance was great this year. Predicted everything perfectly except for showing me that I had very low chances at a couple of reach schools that I wound up getting into. My high school is very competitive and kids apply to hundreds of schools, so there was a great amount of data to compare myself to.

More data points means more accuracy. For my sons, selective schools had so few data points, not helpful. For UCLA it was a miss. Both should have made it, but only one did. Not sure if Naviance tracks ‘by major’. The one who didn’t make it was a CS major, so ultra competitive everywhere.

In its 2013-14 Common Data Set, Michigan reported 42,000 applications, of which (according to press reports) 32,000 were from out of state. Michigan hasn’t released data for this year’s admissions cycle, but reports from people who follow these things say that this year they got 65,000 to 70,000 applications, with in-state applications remaining more or less constant at 10,000 or so. That would mean 55,000 or 60,000 OOS applications—an increase of 72% to 88%, depending on the final application figure. When the number of applications is increasing that fast, Naviance data from even two or three years ago are pretty much just junk.

Whatever the final total of applications, Michigan’s OOS acceptance rate this year will come in well under 20%.

Yes, a scatterplot for a school can be misleading to a student who applies to a major where admissions is much more competitive than the overall average for the school.