Naviance - the good and the bad

Naviance is most helpful, IMO and experience, in targeting matches and likelies. Since my kids attended a school with little to no grade inflation and an untraditional grading scale, looking at Naviance was very helpful in seeing how grads from their school did in the proceeding 3 admissions cycles because looking at posts on CC and even data on common data sets wasn’t very applicable.

At the private school, college counselors were able to see the data behind the dots on the scattergrams so were able to provide color.

I found Naviance very helpful in getting a big picture look at a certain college’s admissions outlook. Some schools, Princeton & Georgetown are a few examples, you could tell that the results were less holistic and more stats driven with a clear line between who was accepted and who wasn’t. Princeton specifically, of all the Ivies, had the dots firmly in the top right corner. Other schools, you could see were more holisitic. You could see where some schools must be yield protectors with more high stats waitlists. Most importantly, it was helpful in considering likelies as there were some schools which obviously grooved on applicants from my kids’ high school and accepted a huge chunk, well above their stated acceptance rate. Seeing that, my kids were able to pick a few school where they pretty much knew that they would get in that I would not have guessed at had I just looked at CDS or CC postings. In other cases, we were able to clearly see colleges that were far reaches and not worth the time and effort of adding to the list.

Overall, although it won’t give you all the info of course, I found it a very useful tool.

Also, remember that high schools can tailor their Naviance tools to their liking. Naviance offers a lot of different tools but not all high schools use all tools for their students and parents. What you might see on Naviance could be different than what others are seeing on Naviance from a different high school.

@Trixy34 I wonder if your S could have a conversation with his GC and talk about who he should ask for a recommendation. I bet the GC knows who the stronger writers are.

I am not fan.
Although there can be some benefits for aggregating previous admission statistics (primarily in the larger high schools), remember that Naviance is an expensive investment that is sold to the school districts as a ‘tool’ to lessen the load for the on-staff counselors at the high school during the application process, i.e., transcripts and recommendations.

However, the current steps required to interface with the Common App. makes the experience for both students and counselors more complicated and difficult for no good reason. Their back-end software is seriously out dated.
My students complain that there is nothing intuitive about the Naviance system (instructions always required),
and say that the graphics look like they were created for fourth graders.

It’s fine when the student is applying to an in-state school, such as a UC, where the students’ final transcripts are generally sent after HS graduation. But if a student applies to an OOS or a Common App school, the transcript requests, plus the ability to submit recommendations, all need to go through the HS counselors hands.
While this may not seen like a big deal, if you’re a counselor with the responsibility of 500 anxious seniors and their parents on your roster, it creates another layer of action that those without the Naviance tool do not have to deal with.

Scattergrams are nice, but are they worth it? Not from where I sit…

@melvin123 That’s a great idea. However, I think if I suggest it to S19 right now, he might just blow a gasket. He is very resistant to mom’s involvement in the process.

Depends on what information your school inputs and what they withhold. Our school has 3 years showing for ‘applied/accepted/enrolled’ , current year and the 2 previous years listed above the scattergram by year. The scattergram has data (accepted/waitlist/rejected etc) going back about 5 years or more…for example one college has had only one acceptance in the past 6 years and that was an athlete so there is only one green check mark and we know it was from 6 years ago because we all know who it was.
We have been disappointed in what we were ‘sold’ since we had to pay for it and the information seems spotty at best for certain colleges and I don’t mean the ones where no one applied and there is no information or only one or two applied.
Found the only use we had from it was the ease of typing in a particular college in the search and having the direct link to that school and various other information…urban/rural/large/small etc. as well as the ability to make a ‘list’ of colleges and the ability to add or subtract from the list as we researched more and refined the list. Personally we could have used a spread sheet for that though. JMO

Naviance scattergrams at our high school was extremely helpful. The data is limited to the past 3 years (which is a good thing) and since the high school is fairly large, there are enough data points to make the scattergrams useful. Moreover, it is fairly easy to match individual dots to individual students if you know where certain students applied to and where they got in. For highly selective colleges, Naviance scattergrams was an invaluable tool in my kids college search and selection process.

“We have been disappointed in what we were ‘sold’ since we had to pay for it”

@WithGrace Do you mean you individually or you the school district? If the former, how does that work exactly as I’ve never heard of that?

Naviance was an excellent reality check on the poor information that I was getting from google and various college search sites. I started with the naive idea that if my daughter’s stats were in the middle of a school’s admit range, she had a good shot at an acceptance. Looking at the Naviance results from our school, disabused me of that idea. No one from our school ever gets into Stanford or Swarthmore, regardless of their grades. Schools that I used to think of as matches, such as Wesleyan and Vassar were clearly reaches. The site definitely helped us craft a balanced list.

@doschicos yes, we the family got charged for it. We had to send in payment.

@doschicos not sure if school paid for it for the school and just ‘passed’ the fee on to us…not clear on how that worked to be honest! We get billed for things, like the AP tests, and it was a charge specifically for Naviance. From what I have gathered, from friends elsewhere, is that it is just something they have as a district or school and were not charged as we were. I have concluded that it is only as useful as the information the school inputs so I guess each experience is different

@WithGrace Is it a public or private? Interesting to hear as I’ve never heard of any school charging for Naviance speficially. Granted, at private schools it’s just rolled into tuition costs. I wonder if your school is a real outlier or whether this is more common than I know. Did you have the option of opting in or out?

@doschicos Private. Was not presented with an opt out option. We have itemized bills for things that are ‘other than’ tuition ( field trips, non text books, AP tests, etc), that bill is separate. Not sure how others do it?? It was itemized on the list. At the time we were told how great and helpful it was so didn’t question it too much.

I used Naviance more than my son. As he is the first of four going to college I wanted to get a feel for all the tools that were available in our college search tool box. While it was a nice place to start it certainly didn’t give a lot of information, most of which I found on the colleges own website.
One big issue that I have with Naviance is that it is not broken out by major. My son decided to major in nursing which is at most colleges one of the most or the most difficult major to get admitted for. So while we saw his chances of being admitted at certain colleges as almost a “sure thing” according to Naviance in reality as a nursing major he came up against a much smaller admittance percentage. And obviously yes there is no such thing as a sure thing in college acceptance but the whole idea around Naviance is to give you an idea based on your scores and GPA a ballpark idea for your chances. Naviance and nursing majors don’t mix well. At least in our experience.

Does anyone know why I can’t add schools to my son’s list of schools he’s looking at? Is this an option my school just doesn’t allow? It’s pretty annoying that I can’t seem to save any schools.

@Trixy34 Do you mean that your son already built a list and you can’t add more yourself? Naviance can be set up in a way that only certain people are permissioned to edit (student) and certain people can only view (parents).

Yes, I think he did it with the GC. He only has 2 schools on there. Thanks - that helps.

@Trixy34 @doschicos It must be the way each school sets it up. On ours, parents could add schools to the list but not remove them…and it would say if it was added by student or parent as well. It seems that it is the particular school who configures who/what/when.
Many I’ve spoken to as well as on here, have said that their school lists 3 years and they are all previous years (2015,16,17) ours includes this year (2018,17,16) and ours shows the current acceptances to most schools but is selectively omitting it on the Ivy’s (for our school this year they were all athletic recruits, we know this because they announce them, other ‘elites’ that are not recruits are shown) but the scattergram is many years back 5-6 from what is shown…not sure if that many years back is helpful with the current admissions situations but I think it would add confusion to the safety/match group for many if it is not reflective of a more current cycle.
I agree that it would be annoying to not have the parent able to add schools. We did do that and then we could go through them at a later time and could leave or take off to make the final list.

We have a single login for me and my son. I have imposed a limitation on myself not to remove colleges from the list, though I add them fairly often.

@Trixy34 If he doesn’t mind you logging in as him, I would do that. I found more useful features were available with the student login than with the parent login at our HS. I promised not to make any changes other than to add “colleges I’m looking at.”

It is not separated by majors and doesn’t show whether a student was accepted ED, EA, or RD which the major matters more to a person for what they’re applying into. It isn’t such an accurate prediction of admissions when it comes to naviance.