OP, thank you for being there for a teen in need! And taking it on with two toddlers…that’s a lot. You are doing a great thing. Parenting teens is hard (so are toddlers), and you’ve been thrown into the fire so to speak without the tween years to build up your patience!
Here’s some perspective: One year ago, it sounds like my son was exactly the same as your niece: “17 year old. Currently good grades, 3.7 gpa… Taking dual enrollment. She is a Junior. Here is the problem. She lacks initiative, a non-starter. All school related stuff we have to push and nudge. Smart kid but seemingly “lazy” with the road to college process.” This was my son. While I slowly had weaned away from micromanaging stuff do with high school, he completely lacked initiative in the college process. He also had to be dragged to get his drivers’ license, for example. Not super high on initiative until he feels he “has to.”
So now he is in his senior year, has multiple offers, with merit, from great schools. Harvard? No. Great schools with great reputations that fit him? Yes. Your niece is not behind and still has plenty of time for a college search. Don’t get overwhelmed with the posts on CC with the boatloads of extracurriculars, leadership, full rides, tippy top test scores, 4.8 GPAs etc. etc.
How did my son get here? I took him to a couple of local schools so he could think about questions like big/small/medium, city/rural, geography, stuff like that. I asked him to start thinking about what he would like to study. Over time he came up with two ideas from his high school classes (Psychology, Political Science). Since those are offered everywhere, this was not a limiting factor. I started building a list of LACs, since I think that would fit his very vague major/career ideas, and also looked at schools ranked in these majors (later, those rankings have turned out not to matter, but it led me to some schools to put on a list to start looking into). He took the ACT and we got a local tutor. We did more visits over spring break and his ideas started to become more clear about the type of school and fit. Another visit over the summer, and come senior fall he had a list of about 10 schools to apply to, with me doing a lot of the research, including the finances, and handing it to him to make decisions on where to visit and apply. Yes I had to “nag” during app season when deadlines were approaching. They all got done and submitted on time. He ended up in a great position from starting where your niece was (academically, I don’t mean to discount what has happened personally). Try not to be overly worried. Much as we would like them to, these mini-adults do NOT have our priority system or work ethic.