College can be a stressful topic for most people and when you don’t have the right resources it’s hard ot stay calm and collected. Juniors and seniors have used the online program Naviance for years to help with college-related activities. Naviance provided an easier way to stay organized and apply to different colleges by giving the student a step-by-step to-do list. Counselor Priscilla Greenwood and post-secondary counselor Nana Prange use Naviance to help students complete Common App school reports.

“I will reference Naviance with students when showing them how to request transcripts and look up information on colleges. It has been easy for me to use to do those things and has been a resource I have shared with families,” Greenwood said.

While Naviance can be useful in some ways such as keeping track of your college application progress, it’s sources and statistics are questionable. Senior Matthew Wehling experienced lots of frustration because of Naviance during his application process.

“It’s so complicated to use, there are way too many errors and on top of that when there is an error it takes forever to get it fixed,” Wehling said.

Information like tuition is incorrect on Naviance which adds to the mayhem of deciding what college to apply to, yet nothing has been done to solve this problem.

“For so many years, they were a monopoly.  They had zero competition, so they didn’t need to improve their product or listen to the needs or concerns of their customers,” Prange said.

There were never any competing programs, but over the years, technology has evolved and Naviance is no longer the only program of its kind. 

“The district evaluated and compared many different products and decided to transition to SchooLinks,” Prange said. 

SchooLinks is a much more user-friendly, organized version of Naviance. SchooLinks provides more self-discovery tools, career exploration and planning, college research and application help, course planning, and course registration aid. The biggest difference between SchooLinks and Naviance is their focus. Though supposed to be a college resource program, Naviance lacks attention on prepping for college. SchooLinks is supposedly more dedicated to solely focusing on college preparation and helping in every college related area. 

During a professional development day in February, counselors learned more information about SchooLinks and how to use it. 

“I think this will be a really good fit for our school,” Greenwood said.