I found Naviance very useful, perhaps more than some people here because one of my kids was at a private school that was a little alternative. Although I’ve learned to extrapolate from CDS data if I were to go strictly by the colleges’s CDS numbers at least one of my kids’s list would have looked different from the one worked out with his very competent GC. The ways in which I found it most useful were,
Choosing likely schools. If no one with my kid's stats or worse had been rejected from the school we considered it a likely. Although he wasn't a recruited athlete or URM my kid had above average EC's so we felt pretty good about his admissions chances at these school.
Figuring out which schools loved his school and which did not. We found that for his school there were some very noticeable differences in acceptances at different schools which on paper has the same range of stats for accepted students. Some schools clearly "got" his school while others didn't. We knocked off the schools at which his chances weren't as good and added schools of the same calibre which admitted kids from his school with more frequency.
Extrapolating the GPA. Both of my kid's school had a harder than average grading scale so simply looking at the CDC, Parchment, Niche, or another similar tool and seeing that most applicants had a 3.8+ wasn't all that helpful since those grades were rare at their schools. The college counselors at their schools were diligent about inputting good information. I trusted it much more than the self-reported stats used by some sites.
The students in my kids’ HS come from three different states in roughly equal proportions. Our home state flagship university has an admission rate twice as high for in-state applicants as for out of state applicants. Because Naviance does not identify the state of residence of admitted students makes the data much less useful as we can’t tell whether a student was admitted under the much tougher out-of-state standards or the more lenient in-state standards.
You have to remember that getting an admit at a competitive holistic college is a lot more than GPA, scores, and who has a hook. Look at Stanford’s freshman profile. 6% of kids with 4.0 or higher were admitted. What do you think happened with the other 94%? There are no simple answers. They’re reviewing the whole app, not just where you fit in Naviance. Some of the effort to parse N could be better spent learning what else matters and how to show that, what “edge” really is.
Naviance was useful for us. Since we were targeting big scholarships, seeing past applicants and how my D stacked up was a great gauge of her merit money chances. Local reps were familiar with her school, so they were thrilled to recommend someone who showed interest and was a stronger candidate than they’d seen in years or ever.
Naviance has to protect the privacy of students - they are not going to identify a data point with “URM” or by gender, and it’s unclear how they would report on who was full pay, an athlete or a legacy. It wasn’t designed to take all of the guesswork out of the college process and you still have to do research. The CDS will sometimes tell you if a given school considers legacy status and the CC community can probably tell you which schools might give a break to full pay students.
I find it pretty helpful for two purposes: (1) In-state publics. I can see pretty clear cut-offs for GPA and scores, especially at our more competitive public universities; and (2) finding colleges that seem to “like” our school’s students. There are a few pretty good schools who seem to take almost everyone from my kid’s high school.
+1 on this from tdy123 above: “ignore weird accepted outliers on the plots, they’re probably recruited athletes, legacies, URM or some combination of all three”.
At our older girl’s school, they don’t even give parents access to the scattergrams because of the interpretation needed for some outliers. A parent sees an outlier and thinks “hey, my kid’s got a chance”…but the truth may be that outlier is “some combination of all three” so no, their kids does not have a chance. They were willing to go over scattergrams in person, though.
FYI, pretty sure the OP’s kid(s) go to boarding school (as did/do mine) hence their question about “in/out of state”.