My second child is now beginning he college application process. We were familiar with Naviance from our first son, but only with our second (at another school) were we able to peel away the layers with the help of a guidance counselor.
Our son’s grades (3.8 - 3.9 UW) and SAT (99 percentile) placed him well “in the green” based on the acceptance history of his school (a leading prep school) among some of the top colleges in the US, including the ivies.
However, when the data was sifted to remove legacies, athletic recruits and URM we were now on shakier ground. I know Naviance and the ivies should not even be in the same discussion, since they are such a crap shoot, but the data and value of Naviance is really skewed and misleading.
Do you have any Naviance stories of “safe” or “matches” that did not play out that way?
Well, my son also attends a prep school that uses Naviance. He is a high stat kid. We also created a Parchment account and loaded it with his data too. (The parchment predictor was 100% accurate. He applied to 9 schools for engineering, was accepted to every school that with a ‘match or safety’ prediction (Ga Tech, Michigan, Rice, Vanderbilt, Alabama) and was rejected for every school with a reach prediction (HYPS).
Here are my thought on Naviance and using the data it provides (from his school) :
The composition of the Scattergram will tell you how much a college values GPA and test scores. At Harvard, not one person was accepted with an ACT of 35 or 36. The few accepted people (about 10% had ACTs from 30-34 and GPA from 3.8-4.2. At Cornell it was a lot more consistent - over 50% of the kids with GPA> 3.9 and ACT>34 were accepted. At Rice 100% of kids with 3.8 & 34+ were accepted. Vanderbilt 3.9 & 35+. Michigan 3.6 & 28 (his school is a feeder) etc. etc. If you are on the upper end of the admitted range you are fine.
Ignore all of the admits with on the lower end of the admit group. They are the URM's, legacies, athletes, etc.
Use RD admission rates for the 'real' admission rates. The overall rate is meaningless.
ORM and URM mean different things at different colleges. Gender is important at LACs.
If your child is borderline with respect to the admission area on Naviance that usually means no.
The data on Naviance is backward looking and does not reflect the current admission class.
Be aware of different admission rates within a university. Engineering may have a different rate than CS, liberal arts or theater.
Super-selective schools are not necessarily a good fit for your child. The tier just below that may provide a better experience without extreme stress.
I found the Naviance data to be useful for every university with >10% admission rate. Below that other factors become more prevalent.
Another parent of kids from a leading prep school.
My advice for determining good matches and safeties:
Away from Naviance, listen to your son’s college advisor. Coming from these kinds of schools, they usually know their stuff. My younger child got into 1 reach and waitlisted at 1 reach (a few rejections), and got into all matches and safeties. These reaches, matches, and safety designations came from the college advisor for the list of schools my child was interested in. The college advisor did a good job of pegging the categorizations.
Look through Naviance and see if there are schools that favor applicants from your child’s school. At my kids’ school, it was obviously that there were colleges that really liked this prep school’s grads as there was a much higher acceptance rate than the overall acceptance rate for said schools. Won’t help your son, but some of the women’s colleges fit that profile when we were going through the process for our daughter.
You can also pinpoint schools that are more stats driven when it comes to acceptance than driven by more holistic considerations. St. Andrew’s in Scotland is an example that comes to mind.
Consider schools that are less “popular” among your son’s peers (less internal competition). As an example, for my kids who went to school in New England, this could be LACs in the Midwest that are excellent schools but don’t see the same competition that the NESCAC schools do. Include a school or two outside your geographic region.
@TooOld4School , and @doschicos wow, thanks! This is one of the most helpful posts I have ever seen. It should be pinned. So you worked this out because your kids went to prep schools that tend to send many kids to top colleges? Every single kid who comes to CC wondering if they have a chance at top schools should be reading this post.
I never used parchment, as I learned about it late in the game. I did hire a private advisor for a few sessions. We weren’t always sure she knew her stuff, but now that all decisions are out, it is clear she did. She never offered the remotest encouragement about the two tippy top reaches, and the three “realistic” reaches, she was hopeful about. My D got into one of the five reaches she applied to and was waitlisted at her two top choices, the “realistic reaches.”
Apart from the private advisor, I used college data and niche more than any other website to try to work out her chances. For her matches and safeties, college data site was almost totally spot on. Once anything drifted into the “maybe” area, it was less accurate. College data predicted a solid maybe at her accepted reach, and predicted a “good bet” at a match school she was waitlisted for.
Especially at the smaller LACs, it is very clear that they are crafting a class, and there are so many factors that can affect decisions one way or another. I am also quite certain that the LACs initally admit more Students than they have room for, especially women, and then have to go back and “cull” perfectly wonderful students because they just don’t have the space.
I personally never found Naviance useful, becasue our school wouldn’t publish data if only a few students had applied, to protect privacy. Many of the schools my kid applied to had few or no applicants from our school, so there was hardly any relevant data on Naviance.
Yes, the foreign schools like St. Andrews and Edinburgh are more standardized test-based.
Also consider McGill, which not only is almost completely scores-based but could be as cheap as an in-state public. It’s been called the Harvard of Canada (it’s more like the UMich of Quebec, but that’s still pretty good).
In hindsight it agree with @TooOld4School:
5. If your child is borderline with respect to the admission area on Naviance that usually means no.
My daughter’s at a large public school so it’s a different situation but the scattergrams made it look like she had a shot at the very top schools. I should perhaps have realized that as a non-recruited-athlete white girl she had a very slim chance.
We were wary of the Naviance scattergrams because our son attended a very good public high school with unusual demographics (around 50% URM). Around 95% of the kids to go college, with lots of placements at top schools, but the Naviance data wasn’t quite nuanced enough to be reliably predictive.
A good use of Naviance is to look at the stats of those denied or wl. You may need to ask your GC for that. And for admits, ask your GC to take out those using a particular school as a safety. You get a truer picture that way.