Many high schools provide Naviance, but for first time parents through the system, it’s not always clear what to make of the information. What did you find most useful? What are the pitfalls?
My random thoughts: Naviance works best if the information is not too old. It works best when there is a reasonable sized cohort applying to the college whose acceptance data you are interested in. It will only work if the guidance counselors can input everyone’s data and that data is accurate. Our school hid data and only gave averages if a small number of students had applied to a particular college which I think helps people feel comfortable sharing their data.
When my kids applied I found the Naviance data did a pretty good job. We are a large high school. (Over 600 in the graduating class.) So for many schools there was lots of data. Our school inputted three years of data and I think never kept more than three years at a time.
For some schools it was clear that either SATs or GPAs had a real dividing line - and your chances were miniscule if you didn’t meet certain minimums. Since our school has a large URM and large 1st gen population and a winning football team, I generally assumed the outliers fit one or more of those buckets. In the one instance were I specifically asked the GC about the Stanford acceptances (only the kids with the lowest scores were accepted) that was the case. Helmet sport, URM and in one case a political connection as well. And the scores weren’t terrible - just lower than the ones who were rejected. My kid added to the red dots, but it was no surprise. We did much better with east coast schools that knew our programs and visited the school regularly.
I found Naviance helpful but we had a one on one with the school guidance counselor on how to access the data and interpret outcomes. It was spot on for my daughter except for U. of Michigan.
Thank you for starting this thread, OP. Hope it grows…
Is this correct: Naviance relies on students and/or parents 1) reporting to GC’s which schools they applied to and 2) reporting whether they were rejected, accepted, or waitlisted* to said schools?
IOW, if a given kid or set of kids just keeps quiet, their respective data points never become known to Naviance (?).
*IMO, based on what I’ve learned on CC, waitlists are basically a “nice” way to reject a kid. Arguably almost cruel in getting one’s hopes up, one could argue.
I think the value of waitlist information is that a waitlist meanst that the student is qualified for admission even if not accepted. So yes, a waitlist is a soft rejection, but it is not rejection tied to aiming too high.
That’s not to say that a full out rejection necessarily means that the student was unqualified … just that even if classes end up overfull and the school never goese to the waitlist, the spot still means that the school would be willing to accept that student but for lack of space – and obviously the student didn’t have whatever qualities were needed to make the first cut. But those first cut (acceptance) qualities in a competitive setting are more likely to be holistic factors that probably aren’t reflected well by hard data points in any case.
I found it only mildly useful. D’s school is small (~120 graduating class) so there’s not much data. It was also easy for us to figure out who some of the dots were on the graphs… For some of the schools my D applied to, there was maybe a total of 5-10 other applicants for the entire 3-year period on the graph, so not a large dataset to go on.
Also, they didn’t make use of any of the features like “request a transcript” - she still had to fill out a paper form and bring it to the counselor.
It’s more useful with more data. So if a lot of kids from your high school go there or apply there, you can probably get a reasonable estimate of where you stand. At my kids’ high school, that would include places like the UCs, U of Oregon, Oregon State, Cal Poly, etc.
Things change every year, though, with UC admissions. For my oldest, her stats made her look like a sure thing for UC Davis several years ago, but that year Davis suddenly dropped in admit rate and my D got wait-listed. So use it to get a ballpark idea, but keep in mind that admissions most places have gotten more selective yearly lately.
Waitlists in the high stat part of a college’s plot (higher stat than most of the admissions) may serve as a warning about level of interest, yield protection, and similar issues.
For a college that admits by division or major, how many high schools have separate Naviance plots for each division or major at the college? That can serve as a warning to students who may otherwise feel (over)confident that they are in the “mostly green” zone for the college, when they are really in the red zone for their intended major at the college.
I’ll add… I was looking around there a couple of weeks ago and noticed that no one from our HS has gotten in to I think it was MIT and Brown in the last few years (out of maybe 10 or so who applied to each, with great stats), while we have had kids get in to Stanford and Harvard. Maybe it’s just a statistical blip because that’s not a lot of data to draw a conclusion from, but it made me wonder if our high school is just not ‘on the radar’ for Brown and MIT. Who knows.
I was wondering about this too. From our school for the past 3 years 5 students were admitted to Harvard, 6 to Yale, 7 to Stanford but only one to Princeton, with comparable number of applicants (except for Stanford which is a lot more popular).
Yes good point - our school did not realize that Carnegie Mellon might as well be five different colleges if you are looking at average SAT scores and admissions rates. Luckily they have the admissions statistics by school on their website. We didn’t have many acceptances to Princeton, but that was because far fewer applied. I think kids saw it as too preppy and too rich. The only kid I know who went there floundered. He never finished his thesis. He should have graduated five years ago…
I’m always suspect of Naviance because you can only see GPA’s and scores. There’s no way to know anything more specific than that about the student so you don’t know what level of classes they took or whether they were recruited for a sport. It’s not really apples to apples.
Our Naviance had the weighted GPA, which is a pretty good proxy for the rigor of the classes taken. But it’s only one peice of the puzzle. I know when I could see that my kid was in the range of 50% of the dots were green for Harvard, I spent a lot of time worry about whether what my kid did outside of grades and scores was as good as what the accepted kids had done. I knew that at least one had been an Intel finalist (my kid dropped science research freshman year), but had a whole slew of CS activities that might, or might not be regarded favorably by admissions officers. At the time I thought his chances were a little better than 50/50. In retrospect I think I was overly optomistic, but he was accepted, and Naviance certainly gave me good reason to think that Harvard seemed to have a pretty good opinion of our school. (At the time Yale, MIT, Stanford and Princeton were accepting far fewer of the high scoring/high GPA students.
I used Naviance much more than my D. She went to a small private HS but I still found it useful. I was able to see that a college that generally qualified as a safety was a slam dunk for graduates from her school, most likely due to alignment of educational philosophy.
This college was obviously being used as a safety becsuse hardly any graduates actually enrolled. But for D, what started out as a safety became her 2nd choice and she was even almost happy that she didn’t get into #1 and have to decide between the two.
I also found the feature - don’t remember exactly what it was called - but it showed what other schools applicants to X College also applied to - very useful in creating a college list.
The one thing that I don’t think I could do with Naviance was to look at individual admissions cycles. For the UCs, for example, results from 5 years ago or even 2 years ago are not aplicable at all now.
I didn’t think Naviance was helpful at all for schools that admit holistically. Thinking of the 2 kids from our school that got into Harvard, 1 is a legacy and the other is an URM, and both are amazing kids. But Naviance doesn’t tell you those details, and that’s critical information. There are so many terrific things that kids at our school do, that no one really knows about because they do it outside of school. So even if you find out who the kids are behind the statistics, you still might not have the full story.
At our (public) school, there are precious few admits to Harvard and Yale. Princeton seems to be a bit more reachable. Good number of waitlists to U Chicago, but no early decision applications. I wish I knew when the few acceptances to ivys and top tier schools that appear were from. My gut tells me they were not recent. There seems to be one student who had 4.0+ with a 1590 SAT that was rejected from everywhere, including the state flagship. Wonder what was happening there!
@Trixy34 the kid rejected from everywhere probably had a so-so recommendation or something was off on his essays. It’s so important that you ask the right person for a recommendation, and the worst part is, you don’t really know if that person is good at writing recommendations or not, you can only guess.
But that’s my point about Naviance. Once kids reach certain stats, it comes down to hooks and intangibles like essays and recommendations, and Naviance can’t tell you a thing about that.
@melvin123 I think it was something else, because the kid didn’t get in to Pitt or Penn State (in state). I’m not sure Penn State even looks at recommendations. Maybe missing some required courses? Arrested? I have no idea, but it does make me curious.
Ugh - thanks for reminding me about recommendations. My son needs to get on that. He already got shut out of getting one from his Calc teacher because his ultra-competitive friend asked her in January and started a rampage and by the time S19 asked her, she was all filled up.
