When I was using it, there were definitely some colleges for which it was useful. You could tell at a glance – lots of data, nice, clean lines. For others, as many here have said, the usefulness of Naviance was mainly in disabusing me of the notion that small differences in high test scores and GPA mattered much to the most selective colleges.
But even when there is a clear, unmistakable pattern, “useful” is not the same as a guarantee.Things change, mostly slowly but sometimes very quickly. My son was waitlisted at a college where the Naviance data showed a 100% chance of acceptance. And it was true – he would have had a 100% chance of acceptance if he had applied at any time in the decade before his actual application. But he applied in the first year of a new administration, and if you looked at the Naviance data three years later, you would have concluded that he had about a 25% chance of acceptance if he didn’t apply ED.
Not too useful for us as the samples were too small. Kids went to smaller schools where almost everyone applied to public in-state schools. The CSU schools that ate stats driven were accurate but not info you couldn’t get anywhere else. The more competitive UC’s that include essays were still a toss up for those kids at the top of the scattergram. The private schools we were looking at have like 5 kids apply in the school history so not a great sample size.
One of the most helpful things for us was a reality check on likelihood of acceptance. Its easy to delude yourself into think that if you have excellent grades and a great SAT score, you have an excellent chance at a top school. After all, you think, “What else could they want.” It was surprising and humbling to see how many “perfect” stat kids are rejected. It was also a rude awakening to me about what actually constitutes “high stats.” When I went to school, a million years ago, B+ was a perfectly acceptable record you could be happy about. Back then schools like NYU had acceptance rates over 70%. Naviance reveals some of those changes and helps kids put together a reasonable list.
Naviance can also give you an idea what the GPA means from your particular school. Colleges understand which schools are tougher on grades than others. The GPA needed to get into Cornell from our particular school, for example, seems to be somewhat different from what you would learn by looking at the country as a whole.
Naviance stats for our kid’s competitive (not super competitive) high school in CA was not a good indicator of the likelihood of our kid’s getting into top schools except maybe for UC schools. This was because GPA and test scores alone do not give a good indication of admission for certain colleges. All I saw were rejections and more rejections for kids with seemingly perfect GPAs and nearly perfect test scores. For few very top schools, GPAs and test scores of the kids who got in were slightly lower than the kids who got rejected. This alone indicated to me that once your kid’s GPA and test score are at certain level, they really don’t care about them and they look at other areas such as hooks, legacies, your essays, LoRs, whether you won certain competitive competitions, your demonstrated talents, activities etc.
There was this one teacher who kept on telling our kid to lower his standard and apply to some school he had no desire to attend. It got to a point where I politely told the teacher that my kid rather go to a community college and transfer rather than go to an OOS college which was not that desirable to us. Some teachers have no idea what they are talking about mainly because they really don’t know particular kids and their ECs and other talents.
We were looking for merit, so it was not very useful for that. Using the CDS and diversity data (we are “geographically” diverse for not the “name brand” east coast schools) for each school was more helpful. But, for personal reasons, S was allowed to apply to a few full pay options of his choice. For the school he chose which was clearly grade sensitive on Naviance (S had lower grades/higher test scores), it was spot on. My take away, no amount of stellar/unusual ECs will get an unhooked student into a school where his/her GPA is below the green area.
Naviance could be useful if you could filter out athletes, legacies, URMs, various hooks. It could be misleading if the school is small, have students with various hooks. If your kid is non-hooked white kid with high stats you may be lead to believe some of those top schools are matches. Likewise for ORM, like Asians. That was definitely the case when D1 was applying to schools. She was on the top right hand corner for many top schools, so we assumed she would have quite a few acceptances, but that wasn’t the case.
When D2 was applying to law schools, which was more stats driven, we were able to use some data sources to predict her acceptances. Some of those data sources even ask people to self identify if they were URM or not. We could clearly see the URMs could be 5-10 pts below the mean for LSAT and still got admitted. Those charts also allowed us to filter out certain so it would be more representative of D2’s profile. I do not believe Naviance lets you do that or the data is not even captured.