Every year, the counseling requires teachers to show a video on Naviance. Naviance is a website designed to help students with their long-term goals, whether that’s going to college, joining the military or going into the workforce. And according to the Naviance website, over 10 million students utilize their tools and databases.

With its useful graphs, extensive database on various college and career paths, as well as a mobile-friendly website, Naviance can be valuable to students. Furthermore, the Naviance database sorts data into categories, allowing to students to find the information they need all in one place. After clicking on the name for a specific college, students can find many statistics, the most beneficial of which being scattergrams on the acceptance rates of former Carmel High School students based off of SAT scores and GPA, as well circle graphs that give students a general idea of the age, gender and race of current students.

These graphs are extremely beneficial to students. It allows them to investigate their chances at being accepted to different colleges, as well as the type of culture that would be around campus. This gives students an idea of how they might like the school and helps those interested in a very specific demographic at a university.

Despite this, a few aspects of Naviance cause students to spend more time getting to the most important information. Some functions, such as signing up for college visits, are hidden among numerous subcategories, forcing students to dig through many webpages before finding the tool they want. There are also problems with linking Naviance to other websites, like the Common App and the Coalition App, which make students to enter their information multiple times. This is a waste of time, which, between extracurriculars and homework, many students don’t have a lot of. These are things that can be avoided by utilizing the counseling center’s instructional videos on Naviance; however, many students find the videos uninteresting and do not pay attention while they play.

We understand Naviance helps immensely with creating plans for adulthood, as well as why the website appeals to counselors as a tool for them to help their students. However, we still believe that the counseling center could create more informative and engaging videos to assist students with the use of Naviance’s functions and databases, allowing students to get the full use of the information Naviance provides.