We are getting closer to that time --applying to colleges-- and we have been on Naviance looking at matches for my child based on GPA and SAT as well as the data on who from your school applied and got in to various schools with similar stats. I find Naviance and the data it spits out this to be absolutely worthless: they tell you number of those that applied and were accepted and their average SAT or ACT and Average GPA. They don’t tell you who was in state or out of state, who was full pay verses needed FA, who was an athlete, who was an URM and who was a legacy. How can you possibly use this information to make informed choices when there are so many unknown variables?
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Naviance access is normally provided by your child’s high school. All of the information is from prior year students at the HS, which will give you a pretty good idea of the admission chances at any particular university. It will not tell you where to apply, your child’s GC should be able to help with that. Knowing the most popular choices of other students may help your child too. Typically your state’s flagship and #2 are popular for better students, with a smattering of private colleges. Seeing a lot of applicants and acceptances to highly selective private schools tells you that your child’s HS is favored by that college’s admission office. Perhaps they have a good relationship with a HS GC.
It is very useful in weeding out colleges where your child would have little to no chance of admission. You will have to go to the NPC at each college to get an estimate of price. Since Naviance does not know your income and assets, don’t expect any more information that sticker price.
There are simply too many colleges to use GPA/SAT ranges outside of the extremely selective colleges. I would start by looking at rankings for the subjects your child might be interested in. These are often available by state. If he/she is interested in , say, engineering or nursing, you can weed out a lot of colleges quickly.
@TooOld4School thanks. i still dont think its helpful. too many variables
We found Naviance to be somewhat helpful. You are looking at just your HS data, right? So the graphs are all kids from your HS. True, you can’t see who is hooked. I always assumed outliers who got accepted were hooked. If there are graphs whereno data is shown because the number of students is small, ask your GC – ours was willing to talk us through what they woukdnt show on the graphs.
It probably isn’t too helpful for large state university admissions. But for smaller schools that don’t admit by major it is.
Every school manages its own Naviance database. Ours was hands down the best tool available, in part because the school had a grading scale that was different from the norm and in part because they were really careful about data integrity. If you read some of the threads here, you will see how that can differ wildly. But no, it doesn’t show who was the recruited athlete or the legacy whose family name is on the west quad. One good thing to do is to as your GC to explain confusing data for the schools that interest you. As with most yhings, YMMV.
For our HS, we found the Naviance data to actually be very accurate. Of the 5 schools my D applied, she got into the 4 we expected based on the data and was rejected to the one we thought was going to be close. We have a large HS so the size of the school might help to have provided a bit more credibility to the data. No tool is perfect and you do have to draw some conclusions from what you see but I didn’t find the data to too far off from other tools we looked at for our HS.
I’m with you OP. My kids’ school dropped Naviance since my oldest applied and I don’t care.
Since schools are somehow collecting the data, here’s an idea that might work (our school does this): develop a list of every school each kid (not identified in name only by GPA and test scores), and star those kids who are legacy and URM. We have that aggregated for the last five years, so there are too many datapoints to be able to identify kids individually. But we get a very clear picture by gpa/test scores of where each applicant was accepted, and whether they have a major hook (you could add athletic recruits as well. our school doesn’t). The reason that’s better than Naviance is that you get a sense of a full picture by applicant, not just a dot for by school. So you can see that X kind of applicant was actually accepted at six specific schools. After you look through a few hundred profiles you get a very clear picture of what’s going on. Yes, there are exceptions that probably reflect great EC’s, essays or recommendations, but not very many. The stats, even at the tippy top, have an incredibly high correlation with acceptance – especially when you can look at all the schools each applicant was accepted by, not just one by one as in Naviance.
I have said for years Naviance is practically useless, particularly for our HS. The data is only as good as what is collected and inputed. There is no mandatory data collection at our school and whoever is inputting the info is doing it hit or miss. If you are at a young school there are not enough data points to be useful. If your child is applying to schools that are not “popular” with their peers there are not enough data points. If you live in Texas the 10% auto admit rule skews the data. If you are choosing schools where there is a wide range of accepted students (such as state flagships) or if you are looking as an OOS applicant looking at publics the data is unreliable.
DD2016 (unhooked, suburban B/B+ student with corresponding mid-range ACT/SAT scores) was literally in the “red zone” for every single school (12) to which she applied. According to Naviance she was below the 25% nationally at some of the schools. Frankly, if we had paid any attention to Naviance statistics my DD should have applied to our local CC and been grateful she was accepted. DD2016 was accepted at every single one of the schools she applied to, every single one. So far, we are having a very similar experience with similar stat DD2018, although she is in the “yellow zone” for some of her choices, and that is with 2 more years worth of data points.
My kids were focusing on USNWR top #50 - #115 ranked schools and a few high ranked LACs. Of course I believe that Naviance would have been entirely accurate in it’s assessment that my kids were unlikely to be accepted at an Ivy or top #20, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that! Naviance is a decent starting point, but you really do need to do thorough research combining info and statistics from numerous places to get a semi-accurate picture. We found Parchment and Cappex/Niche to be informative, helpful and just as, if not more, predictive than Naviance.
FYI, you know CC and Naviance are related right?
It’s a start. That’s about it. I kind of like looking at the graph and seeing the “good zone” and “bad zone” and determining the median from the High School. That way you can roughly estimate whether or not your kid has any realistic chance of acceptance. It’s far from perfect though. You can also easily find a lot of similar data on Common Data sets from the schools, and many times even more detailed info regarding admissions stats.
With Naviance I don’t like that you can’t know if the accepted students were URM, boy or girl, first generation, legacy etc. Those are huge factors at certain schools.
Okay so its not just me.
I find it helpful. I just have to be in the right mood to look at it - LOL! Sometimes it gives me anxiety! But I think the information is good, and directional. I also like the tools - just started using the school comparisons etc.
And don’t the Letter of Recommendation requests go through Naviance now? That seems good right?
You mean my kid can’t get in to an Ivy with a 2.74 GPA, like someone else from her school?
It’s only partially useful. Our school keeps stats by hooked/unhooked, ED/RD in the office, but you can’t take a copy with you. That’s much more useful for comparing stats.
I never thought about the low stat acceptances being likely athlete admits – that is veryyy interesting! 
@center how would you choose a College as match? I have access to some data but I have no idea if it is naviance data.
If I see my daughter GPA/SAT scores are higher than all the kids who applied and got (100%) admitted at that lower GPA range. Let us say 10 kids applied who have lower GPA than my daughter’s GPA and all 10 were admitted to the college. I also look the admitted kids mean SAT scores. If admitted SAT scores fall below the SAT scores that my daughter have. Would you consider this college under match?
I am just getting idea as how would you perceive that college is a match.
I also had issues with my Naviance, but I read in one of the comments above that the data is input by the school itself and that’s beginning to make a lot more sense as to why some people find navaince more helpful than others. For my highschool we had one specific college counselor and all the other guidance counselors didn’t do much. However my college counselor quit my junior year and they struggled to replace her. This explains why the data for my naviance was very out of date. The data we had was from kids who got applied to college 2-4 years before we had, and the guidance counselors probably had no idea how to update the information.
Personally I find there is no better tool than looking at the college or university’s own websites that list the stats of the previous year. Many times when I compared the stats from the school’s website with the stats on naviance I found the school’s website was a much more accurate as well as selective range.
My take on Naviance is that it can be a useful guide provided the HS has a history of a significant number of applications at schools you are interested in. When my son was applying, our interpretation of the scattergrams went something like this: If your circle lands in, or north east of a big field of green squares, the school is probably a safety; if the circle lands in a field of red x’s, you have virtually no chance; for anything in between, you have a chance, but it certainly isn’t a safety; and ignore weird accepted outliers on the plots, they’re probably recruited athletes, legacies, URM or some combination of all three.
Think of Naviance as a guide, not a guarantee. It was most useful for us in choosing where to apply between peer schools. For example, the scattergrams for Princeton showed a random distribution of red and green in the north east end of the plot. Harvard showed a clear break between green in the far north east shifting to red in the south west. One glance showed that Princeton was a crap shoot for kids from our HS, while Harvard was much more predictable.
@tdy123 I am looking very low GPA. I am just looking scores two notch below where 100% admittance is there.
“They don’t tell you who was in state or out of state, who was full pay verses needed FA, who was an athlete, who was an URM and who was a legacy. How can you possibly use this information to make informed choices when there are so many unknown variables?”
What do you mean by instate vs out of state? Naviance reports on a particular hs so all the applicants would be instate (e.g a California HS applying to UCLA) or out of state (a Cal HS applying to Purdue) . Naviance is a good tool to get a general idea of how a college views a particular HS but I don’t think anyone, including Naviance themselves, would say it’s should be used as a predictive tool esp given the variables in selective college admission. The point about bad data in, bad data out, is a good one though.
I guess I just thought of Naviance as a ballpark idea, not gospel for whether my kid would get in. Indeed, even our GC’s guesses turned out to be wrong for one kid (who got in everyplace). I know when you are in the midst of applications you can be straining for every scrap of info to help you figure out the best path and likely result. But Naviance is just another tool. It is only as good as the data entered, and it is past performance of kids who are not the one on your couch. So I’d pay attention to the broad outlines of what it shows you. But nothing more.