Hi, our DS was admitted to a number of schools this past week. Very relieved. His older sister also is a senior this year at a BS and just went through the college application process. In her college application process, we thought Naviance was a helpful tool (but only as reference and not guidance).
Would it be inappropriate to ask the AO a temporary access to Naviance of the schools where our DS was recently admitted?
Thanks!!
You could certainly ask. I would start, though, with the school profile and matriculation list, both of which are probably on the website and both of which were meant for sharing with 3rd parties. Then if you want info you canât get from them, they may be happier sharing their Naviance site.
Honestly, I canât imagine a school sharing Naviance with a prospective parent when they wonât provide access to current parents until Junior year. If you request, I can imagine the AO will ask what data youâre after and what youâre trying to assess and will then provide you with their public-facing matriculation data not an account into their private database.
Choate wouldnât provide Naviance to Junior parents until after College Info weekend and after the school had had a chance to explain how to use it and how to interpret the data. Each school determines what the user interface presents to its population, so even if youâve used Naviance elsewhere, you may not be looking at exactly the same options, graphs, etc.
Again, I would think this level of access is highly unlikely or every prospect out there would be asking for it.
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Thank you! Both of your feedback are very helpfulâ@ChoatieMom and @gardenstategal
We thought of requesting Naviance access since the school public site does not show the number of students matriculated to each college during the past years. The school only shows in âboldâ where students matriculated âthree or moreâ. Based on this information, it is hard to glean the exact number of students to which the school sent its graduates.
If I ask the AO, would they at least provide a matriculation data sheet where they show the numbers of matriculated students vs. allowing temporary Naviance access?
Many thanks!!!
I think itâs excessive to ask. Though I totally understand where you are coning from, I love real data.
Hereâs the real issue, your kid is unique. These schools are small. No kid is going to mirror yours at the same BS and also want to apply to the same college so itâs all hypothetical. Even if two kids had same stats and were both female from the same state, still not a match. The essays, ecs and recs will be different.
Chose whatever school is the best fit. They all get kids into Harvard or MIT or Oxford or whatever your kid is after. But iâd bet your kid will have a wider horizon by Junior year.
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I doubt that very much.
What are you trying to deduce? Boarding schools do not send students to particular colleges. They prepare them well for whichever colleges they choose to attend, but the colleges do the selecting. This is why most of the boarding schools stopped preparing the type of matriculation list you are asking for. They are trying to help prospective students and families avoid drawing erroneous conclusions or making false comparisons.
For example, if you knew that Yale appears to accept a disproportionately higher number of Choate students than another BS, would you conclude that Choate does a better job of âsendingâ students to Yale? That would be an incorrect conclusion. Those matriculation numbers are misleading because of the number of Yale faculty children who attend Choate due to its proximity to the college. Or, would you look at the number of students from BS X, BS Y, and BS Z who go on to attend College A and try to deduce which school is best for your child if your child wants to attend College A or one like it? It doesnât work that way; those individual numbers would tell you absolutely nothing about your childâs chances from that school for ANY particular university. And that is the type of error the boarding schools are trying to avoid by not providing data that cannot provide that insight.
I have commented on this topic before, but I love how @PhotographerMom says it every year:
Go to all the âTopâ 20-25 BS websites. Print all the matriculation lists and remove the name of the school at the top. Next- mix them up well and throw them up in the air and let them fall to the ground. Now scoop them up and try to identify the school or tell them apart. Let me know how you make out.
You can read her full post here.
You cannot judge or compare boarding schools by exactly how many students from each attend individual colleges. It IS useful to see a list of colleges where, say, three or more students have chosen to matriculate in the past five years as that gives you a sense of what a good job a BS does in preparing its students to be attractive to a range of colleges and the types of colleges its students have preferred in the recent past. Remember, boarding schools are selling a stellar high school education, not particular college results. Every single boarding school discussed on this forum prepares each and every one of its students to be successful in college, and that is what youâre paying for and why you choose to allow your child to attend one.
There was a discussion a while back on this subject when Deerfield went to a more generalized matriculation list that you may want to read.
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Probably not. Because it will not be applicable to your kid.
Copying over a post of mine from a different thread: If you are choosing a boarding school based upon college matriculation data, you are choosing a boarding school for the wrong reason.
As I have said many many times on this forum, do not go to boarding school if your only purpose is to use it as a stepping stone to a top college; that reasoning is just folly. A boarding school may give a student the tools with which to develop him/herself into a viable candidate, but others schools may as well. Colleges admit students, not boarding schools.
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Thank you all for your comments. Really appreciate them. I totally agree with your comments that choosing to send your child to BS for them to enter a top college is absolutely the wrong decision to make.
I also agree that deducing that Choate prepares kids well for Yale, or Groton for Harvard, or Lawrenceville for Princeton, based on the high matriculation numbers would be a complete mistake in deduction.
However, if I had the matriculation data for the schools, I can generally infer what percentage of kids from BS X sent kids to the top 35 colleges vs. BS Y vs. BS Z. Again, I know Iâm opening a Pandoraâs box on what defines âtop 35â colleges; Iâm not trying to argue the merits of the methodology employed in college ranking systems here.
All I want to figure out is: some objective output (eg, % of kids matriculated to say top 20 or top 30 colleges, not a particular school) across boarding schools to which our child was recently admitted. At least that would be one benchmark that can be used as a factor to decide, in addition to the childâs fit, rural vs urban, size of school, %of boarders, etc. If the data is available, i can compute if BS X matriculates 35% of its graduates to the top 35 schools vs. BS Z matriculated 5% of its graduates to the top 35 schools, etc, over a 3 year or 5 year period. For some BS, this can easily be done since the information is readily available on their website. But for some, this is impossible since they only disclose in âboldâ where 3 or more students matriculated.
Again, Iâm not saying that the decision to choose BS X or BS Z should solely be based on the matriculation data; however, it is one data point that can help in the overall process.
You speak my language! I love looking at the matriculation data from schools, and have done so just for the fun of it for schools kiddo didnât even apply to. I have wasted so much time on comparing trends among schools, and canât even calculate it. I really should be embarrassed. But if it is wrong, I donât want to be right. 
Hereâs the thing though, I can confidently say I donât think any of it matters. I have not learned a darned thing that would sway me one way or another as to which school would best fit my kid. Colleges take all kinds of kids from all kinds of schools for all kinds of reasons. You canât really tell a strength of a schoolâs stem program by whether they have a bunch of kids at MIT or CalTech. Naviance doesnât really do a great job at answering your question because you donât know why that dot on a graph got into a particular college.
I think the matriculation lists, rough as they may be, are good enough to get to the core of your question. You know the class size, you know the number of years aggregated. Thatâs enough to get percentages and broad strokes.
To me, the best question to ask is not where the top 25% of the class goes, but where does the bottom 25% go. If you are looking at the Top 25 boarding schools, those top students are all going to the same places. Assume your kid wonât be in that group. Take the Ivies out of the analysis. Thatâs where matriculation lists can reveal something about the school and what the kids are like that graduate.
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Lots of interesting comments here. But it is highly unlikely their licensing agreement even allow this.
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Actually this too can be extremely misleading. Our school has a bunch of colleges on the matriculation list with 80%+ acceptance rate which would lead you to believe the kids going there were slackers with terrible grades in the bottom 25%. Alas, they are almost all athletes who want to play D1 in college and those are the schools that have good teams in their sports and offered them a spot. There are also kids who matriculate at âlesserâ schools because they got killer merit aid there, and since they know they plan to go to graduate school and their parents make too much for substantial FA it makes sense to choose most affordable undergrad option. The college admissions numbers are useful in aggregate but even Naviance will not tell you why are the kids getting in, and vast majority of kids going to top colleges have something besides grades/scores.
Honestly I canât imagine a school that would give prospective parents Naviance access, there is no upside of doing that, and honestly if I was an AO I would hope such family chooses another school.
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WOW - I canât believe I didnât jump onto this thread earlierâŠgood thing it is almost cocktail hour in the 19th hole 
First I have to say this to all new BS parents: Please calm down and breathe. Second: Please donât be stressing out your kiddo(s) right now about college placement and please donât put that pressure on them when deciding on a prep school.
As mentioned above, there are many variables that contribute to the matriculation statistics you are seeking. There have been other variables (like COVID and test optional) that have changed the landscape for our current college-bound kids. Other factors include WHO goes to certain schools for athletics, are recruited athletes, or students getting Merit. Maybe in the old days, certain boarding schools were âfeedersâ into certain colleges. IMHO itâs a different world today.
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Totally agree. I donât think you can judge anything about the quality of a school by looking at the acceptance rates of the colleges students go to. But even with your example, the destination schools would underscore the presumable reputation that the bs generates recruitable athletes. I have never known a bs to be shy about letting prospective parents know that was a thing, so I would trust parents to figure out that connection as reflected on a matriculation list.
The one nugget I have gleaned from looking at the matriculation lists that I thought was weird and interesting but not necessarily useful is that each school has a second tier LAC they seem to favor, which one is unique to each school.
And the big one - WHO is a legacy and/or development applicant.
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Perfectly reasonable question to ask. Spending over a quarter of a million dollars is not a drop in the bucket, and it makes sense to see what the ROI might be. But be prepared that the schools wonât answer. Or give you their matriculation sheet. If they refuse, ask admissions to give you the contact name of a parent of a recent graduate who would be willing to speak.
Yes, you are going to be spending $$$$. That prospect does not entitle you to obtain inside information that is provided in systems like Naviance. The info is under wraps for a reason.
Students and parents @BS get that info Junior year. And the info is used to protect the personal data of previous students.
BS are NOT selling you/your kids a spot to any college. They are selling you an educational experience. Neither they, nor you, know where you will land. And they will tell you directly itâs unlikely you can control the outcome.
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I agree with everyone now that allowing Naviance access could be difficult for privacy, licensing issues etc.
However, shouldnât the school at least disclose the matriculation sheet w numbers for at least past 2 to 3 years?
Seems most schools including Choate, Andover, Exeter, Lawrenceville transparently disclose this information on their websites.
If the school or AO declines to release that information if I ask, should I interpret that as a âred flagâ or some internal policy constraint?
They wonât decline. All schools, no matter the selectivity range, will give you this information.
Do a search for âschool profile â and the name of the school. It is the name of a specific document every high school provides colleges. They are almost always on the schoolâs website somewhere, typically in the college counseling section.
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Thank you @CateCAParent !
Unfortunately the school we r considering only shows a list of schools where students matriculated and only in âboldâ where 3 or more students matriculated. Even in their school profile.
Frankly this is not much disclosure in comparison to other schools where they show the exact number of matriculants over many years.
I will ask the AO and see if the exact numbers can be disclosed. Hopefully they will disclose.
Again, this will not be the the sole or primary determinant in our decision process but will be one of many factors.
Thank you!!!