<p>So our school finally has instituted Naviance, and I'm playing around with it. This is a suburban public high school in the Chicago area. It's "good" (top 6% according to Newsweek, blah blah blah) but it's not one of the North Shore powerhouses (New Trier, Highland Park, etc.). Most students stay in state and the prevailing culture is such.</p>
<p>So, I can see from Naviance that kids have applied (and been accepted) to some of the usual-suspect top 20's -- all Ivies except Columbia (you know how scary Noo York can be to midwesterners, LOL), the occasional MIT, Stanford, Vandy, Carnegie Mellon, WashU, etc. and of course the usual suspect of Northwestern.</p>
<p>However, as those who have read me on other threads know, my kids are looking at colleges that would be off the beaten path by the local standards. This would encompass things like the women's colleges, such as Bryn Mawr. This would encompass universities like a Brandeis that aren't going to be on the radar screen in an area without a large Jewish population. This would encompass some of the NESCAC and similar schools -- Bates, Colby, Colgate, etc. This could encompass a William & Mary. Etc. </p>
<p>On one hand, they wouldn't be competing with kids from their school. OTOH, it's quite possible that the school is unknown from these colleges' perspective. Is that problematic? The thing that concerns me is precisely because we are suburban Chicago. If we were in the middle of Nebraska, I could see a college saying "we're not familiar with this school because few people from Nebraska ever apply to our college anyway." But when there will be lots of kids from the surrounding areas / high schools, would this work against us if the school is less known? Would welcome any thoughts.</p>
<p>My kids went to a HS for which something like Naviance would be, still, a foreign concept. So, on one hand, I can’t replicate your experience. On the other hand, I can attest that my D was, almost certainly, the first kid on record to apply to the small LACs she did. And, we are ten miles from NYC. But, eons away. So, we were less than well known, to put it mildly, but with no excuses. Despite that, she got into some excellent schools (this was on transfer, but my take is that is, if anything, more difficult.). We are surrounded by “better” schools with much, much “better” student records, but these schools looked at, as far as I can tell, the kid, not the high school.</p>
<p>I really don’t think it’s a problem, but it is interesting. That said, I’m frequently surprised at how few applications some of the LACs have at our school. We are a huge school, but 90% of the kids don’t look beyond SUNY and a few NYS private schools, the Ivy’s and the most well known LACs.</p>
<p>Pizza, you must make it your A priority to get a copy of the school report and your kids transcript by the end of junior year and go over it with a fine tooth comb. It will take months to get errors corrected and if the adcoms don’t know your school even nomenclature can be fatal. Grades should be accurate. Non-credit courses (yearbook, gym, etc.) should clearly be delineated from academic subjects. Classes which are mandatory pass/fail should be noted as such so it doesn’t look like your kid has opted out of grading due to laziness.</p>
<p>Course titles- standard college level biology needs to be called “Biology”. If it’s something other than that (" approaches to life sciences") it smells like non-college prep. I’ve seen transcripts with bizarre descriptions of Literature courses (eg. Contemporary minds and new voices) which again, is more obfuscating than clarifying. So if your kids are applying to schools that don’t know your HS, the transcript must be clear and easily read… oh yeah, pizza kid took four years of history, four years of English, four years foreign language, a traditional bio/chem/physics/honor physics sequence, or whatever. Don’t make it hard for them to work through the transcript. They’d like to cut your kid a break but if the transcript makes it impossible to understand what your kid has been doing for four years… they can only do so much.</p>
<p>The school report- errors abound. A town near mine hadn’t updated it since the early '70’s to the detriment of dozens of kids applying to competitive schools. The stats on the socio economics need to be accurate; it is very unfair to striving kids who live in neighborhoods of disadvantaged families, a high immigrant population, high numbers of kids growing up where English isn’t spoken in the homes if the school report describes some mythic “Leave it to Beaver” town which existed 30 years ago. Take the report up through the superintendents office if you have to- but don’t let it go out to schools riddled with errors.</p>
<p>Your kids will be fine. Adcoms admit kids, not HS, but you need to give them enough ammunition to understand your kid in the context of the community.</p>
<p>Are you sure NO ONE has applied? Sometimes schools won’t post data on Naviance if the numbers are too small in order to protect students’ privacy.</p>
<p>The culture at both my sons’ HS programs is to apply to the long shots and the flagship (which loes kids from these programs and is generous with merit $$ towrds them). Both kids have applied to schools “outside the box” in that regard and S1 did quite well. (Keep in mind, in our area, UChicago was considered outside the box!!) We hope this will give S2 some great choices as well.</p>
<p>An adcom at a selective school talked to S2 ealier this year and asked where else he was applying. When S listed a couple midwestern LACs, the adcom seemed impressed that S was looking at something other than the usual suspects.</p>
<p>I would say go for it wholeheartedly. There’s not a lot of Naviance data, but if the school speaks to your S or D, why not? Until last year, noone from S2’s school had ever applied to Reed or Grinnell. Makes no sense – they are fabulous schools.</p>
<p>Hmm…at our school, if only one or two students have applied to a school it is NOT included in the Naviance data. The reason is that it would be too easy to figure out who the student actually was. For example, my daughter is the only student in her school to ever apply to her college. Her college has NO data on Naviance at her high school.</p>
<p>Having been a regional rep in the dark ages, I can tell you that it will really help if you have an aggressive counselor willing to pick up the phone and go to bat for the kid and the school. That’s at schools that see plenty of candidates from your region if not your school.</p>
<p>At schools like Bryn Mawr, I think they’d be happy to see a kid from a new school and it would be a plus, such schools need to work hard to expand their base.</p>
<p>One person applied to Reed in 2005 and one in 2008 from our school. I’ve suggested it to my son, but it just seems to far away for him - somehow further even than California. Honestly the only reason Reed was on my radar was because I had a house mate who went to Reed when I was at Columbia.</p>
<p>This is a great thread and some great advice. We’re in the same boat in the same general region as Pizza. USNWR Silver school, some sort of award for percentage of kids who “pass” the AP tests, blah, blah, blah. Everyone goes to U of Mich and State and one or two venture east or to California or to Colorado College and very few venture outside the region. My oldest and now my second are looking or looked outside the region and it’s like going to a foreign country sometime. We have to put out hand up and point to where we are in the mitten. We try to balance it out by visiting a few of “our” regional schools just to feel the love LOL.</p>
<p>I would second what blossom has said. The school report referred to is usually called the “High School Profiles.” Some schools do a miserable job with these things, thinking their purpose is local PR instead of an aid to college admissions officers. Congratulations to your kids for not following the lemmings. Maybe you can persuade one of them to apply to Columbia?</p>
<p>I echo blossom in #6. My kids’ high school did not have Naviance. And even if they had had it, hardly anyone from our HS had applied to the same schools as my kids did. My kids attended an unknown public high school. But it was real important to check the school profile. We did and discovered it was so outdated in so many aspects as to not reflect the real situation. I met with the principal to show her and they did a major revision to it before my kids applied. Had I not checked on it, it would have been detrimental to a student trying for selective schools. I mean there were complete errors on it in several capacities.</p>
<p>I concur that if your school is an unknown commodity in college admissions offices, an informative college profile is critical. Admissions offices have plenty of information about high schools from which they regularly receive applications. They also know the college counseling and guidance counseling staffs, and maybe even some of the faculty from whom recommendations come year after year. But when it comes to unknown high schools, it’s so important to have a profile that accurately portrays the high school, the curriculum, the grading system, and that provides statistics that let colleges evaluate the applicant’s grades, scores, and achievements in the context of his/her school and classmates. </p>
<p>Like soozie, I helped create a comprehensive profile for my son’s unknown high school when he went through the admissions process. He had excellent admissions results. Here’s an article from College Board that I used as a template. It lays out many of the elements of a good profile.</p>
<p>This is a great thread and some great advice. We’re in the same boat in the same general region as Pizza. USNWR Silver school, some sort of award for percentage of kids who “pass” the AP tests, blah, blah, blah. Everyone goes to U of Mich and State and one or two venture east or to California or to Colorado College and very few venture outside the region. My oldest and now my second are looking or looked outside the region and it’s like going to a foreign country sometime. We have to put out hand up and point to where we are in the mitten. We try to balance it out by visiting a few of “our” regional school just to feel the love LOL.</p>
<p>youdontsay-it appears that if only 1 or 2 applied, they indicate but don’t show the data.</p>
<p>Hmom5-I see your point about aggressive counselor, but if the counselor calls and says, “hi, I’m the GC at XYZ High and I want to talk to you about pizzakid” why would the college give her the time of day when she is unknown to them-not because she’s “bad” but simply because the prevailing culture is so regional? It strikes me as almost unfair to expect her to have a relationship with these schools when the majority of her job is getting kids into directional or state flagship. Seriously, why would the college put any stock in what an unknown GC says?</p>
<p>Good advice above, especially about reviewing the profile of your high school. I am a little surprised that there is no data for Colgate - there are a good number of Chicago area kids at Colgate. In terms of assessing your kids’ chances, maybe you can take a look at the admissions data from one of the Chicago area high schools that have sent kids to Colgate over the last 2 or 3 years. When Colgate admissions comes to Chicago for an info session, your kids should go to the session.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, since your kids are juniors this year, you have the luxury of time to stroll by the GC’s office and ask for a copy of this year’s school profile. When I looked at the profile for S1’s school when he was a junior, there were a couple of classes in his program that had not been offered in a couple of years. Colleges might wonder why a kid wanting to major in physics or someone with a stellar math background didn’t take a particular course and it could be held against the student. I pointed this out and they fixed it the good way – by finding someone to teach the course! :D</p>
<p>S1’s GC did a complete WTH?!? when S had Reed on his list. Mudd she could understand, even though hardly anyone applies from our area. Geographic diversity can be your admissions friend, too!</p>
<p>Less than three applicants to a school shows up on Naviance in our system as not having enough data to report. However, if you look at Acceptance History instead of Scattergrams, it will list the # applied and accepted. You just won’t get score info.</p>
<p>One thing S1 did with his teacher recs is that he gave the them some quotes from the schools’ websites about what a school was looking for in their candidates. This would work when you do the parent brag sheet to the GC – share some info about the school (esp. the out-of-the-box ones) and why your D/S has chosen to apply. Can’t hurt — might help. </p>
<p>Your juniors should get on the mailing lists NOW for any colleges they might be considering – thst way they’ll get notices/emails/postcards about local road shows. That can help them fine-tune what they want so that the road trip stage is more productive.</p>
<p>As other posters have mentioned previously, in Chicago you have the luxury of a wide variety of schools within easy striking distance. Your kids might be able to narrow down large/small, urban/rural, etc. just looking locally, even if they have no intention of applying.</p>
<p>It’s the rep’s job to encourage more applications from more schools. No school wants to take 15 kids from New Trier (and they have lots of legacies at top colleges), they would rather get their quota of Chicagoland kids from a greater variety of schools.</p>
<p>Your school actually sounds pretty unusual in being a top high school where even the top kids don’t seem to be applying OOS.</p>