As college application due dates inch closer, millions of students log into Naviance daily, anxiously requesting recommendation letters, transcripts and test scores, only to be disappointed when faced with one of Naviance’s roadblocks.
Naviance is a PowerSchool organization that provides students with tools to assess their college readiness. Beyond that, it’s also essential in the college application process as it allows students to easily request and send their required information to the institutions they are applying to. “The thing that’s nice about Naviance is that you can see everything, all your teacher recommendations and documents laid out for all students, and you can see that they went out on time,” Counselor Ann Redman.
While these tools make college applications much easier, the amount of red tape almost makes Naviance seem pointless. Transcripts take around three weeks to be sent, college lists cannot be altered without seeing the college information director and the website has had multiple issues in accessing required information since Aug. 1, when the Common Application first opened for this application cycle.
Though these issues may be human error, and class size and availability of counseling resources can increase time frames, these are not the sole reasons for the inefficiency of Naviance. Even while writing this article, Naviance has crashed twice. When requesting letters of recommendation this summer, there was a point where the window for requesting letters was open for multiple days before closing again and not letting students request more letters, causing panic and confusion as students scrambled to figure out what was going on before the window was opened again.
Issues with such necessary resources correspond with the discussion of higher education not being accessible enough. While there is an argument to be made that for certain institutions, crossing these restrictions shows dedication and perseverance that they want to see in their students, there gets to be a point where it is just too much. This also adds so much additional stress that students may consider not applying at all. For students who have limited access to resources, this poses a threat to their ability to achieve higher education, as they might not know the time frame of when these issues should be solved or when the appropriate time is to request documents so they have ample time to be processed by Naviance.
Without updates to the website to be able to support all of their users or changes being made to their time frame, Naviance remains a resource that won’t live up to its full potential due to errors that inconvenience millions. If these issues go unresolved for much longer, the gap in the accessibility of education will continue to widen. Students will only continue to be stressed by the prospect of applying to colleges and universities that seemingly want to make it harder for the average student to have a chance at higher education.
