Plain-English help.

Open the School Finder, search for the school by name, click into its dossier, and use the Save button. Your saved list lives at /my-schools and powers the chance estimates, deadlines, and the digest.

Most of the product works without one. An account is needed for the Admissions Predictor, Strategy calculator, Essay Coach, and the syncing of your saved schools across devices. The free tier covers 5 saved schools.

Yes. Use the Household section on /settings to invite your student as a second member. They sign in with their own credentials but see the same saved schools, deadlines, and progress. The owner pays once for everyone.

A household is the group of people who share one workspace. The owner (typically a parent) creates the account and invites a second parent and a student. All three see the same saved schools, profile, essays, and deadline punch list, each from their own login.

Only the household owner can. Second parents and students cannot invite, remove, or change other members. The owner is whoever created the account.

Yes. Each member has their own email and password. Inviting a second parent emails them a single-use link; they accept it and pick their own password.

Deleting the owner's account wipes the entire household. If a member (not the owner) deletes their own account, only their access is removed; the household and shared data stay.

Yes. /my-schools → 'Share with your team' generates a read-only link you can send to anyone helping with this application: an IEC, a writing coach, an admissions-savvy mentor, or your school counselor. They see your school list, application progress, recommender progress, and your notes — they do not see your essays, financial aid, or document vault. The student can revoke access any time. The link is read-only; outside helpers can't edit anything.

School counselors already have Naviance or Scoir, and they won't add a sixth tool. The read-only share link is the right surface for them: they can open it on their phone, see the snapshot, and close it. No login, no install. The same link works for IECs, writing coaches, and family friends with admissions experience.

The score combines the school's published acceptance rate with its Common Data Set factor matrix and, where the school publishes them, the Early Decision and Regular Decision splits. It then weights against your student's GPA, scores, course rigor, and demonstrated-interest signals. Read the full formula at /methodology.

No. It is an educational estimate calibrated to public data and your student's profile. Admissions decisions involve qualitative review and institutional priorities we cannot see. Use the score to compare schools and prioritize effort, not to set expectations.

Most selective schools admit Early Decision applicants at 2-4x the regular rate. Where the school publishes its split, the chance score recalculates the moment you toggle ED. Where the school does not, we fall back to the blended rate.

Demonstrated interest is the trail you leave that shows a college you actually want to go there. Campus visits, info sessions (in-person or virtual), opening admissions emails, contacting a regional rep, attending a college fair, signing up for the applicant portal — each one counts. Roughly a third of selective schools weight it explicitly in their Common Data Set factor matrix (section C7), and many more use it informally as a tie-breaker.

Each school publishes a Common Data Set that rates 'Level of applicant's interest' as Very Important, Important, Considered, or Not Considered. The most selective Ivies tend to mark it Not Considered. Schools like Boston University, Tulane, Lehigh, and many liberal arts colleges mark it Important. We surface the school's own self-reported rating on the school detail page so you know whether to invest the time.

Two places. Open any saved school's detail page and use the 'Your touchpoints' card to log a campus visit, info session, email, etc. with one click. Or open /interest for the full cross-school view, sortable by score and filterable by what each school tracks. Your score is a 0-10 number that combines the type and diversity of touchpoints you have on record.

Strong is 7+ (you have a campus visit or interview plus several smaller touchpoints). Moderate is 4-7 (a couple of meaningful touches). Weak is under 4. For schools that mark interest as Important, aim for at least 3-4 high-value touchpoints by deadline. For schools that mark it Not Considered, don't burn the time — your hours are better spent on the application itself.

It can, at schools that say it does. The score is a planning tool for you, not something you show to admissions. Focus on touchpoints that produce real signal — a campus visit you remember in writing, an interview, a substantive email exchange — over volume that looks performative.

Two different surfaces. /recommendations is the tracker: which teacher you asked, when, and which schools the letter has been submitted to. /rec-letters is the prep packet: a one-page document you send to a teacher BEFORE they write the letter, so they have your brag sheet, top activities, narrative thread, and the schools you're applying to all in one place. Teachers love this — it saves them an awkward 'tell me about yourself' meeting.

No, and that's by design. Recommendation letters and the working notes that feed them are confidential under FERPA, and the Common App asks you to waive your right to see them anyway. The packet has a private working-notes section the teacher fills in for their own reference; you only see that the packet has been filled, not what's in it. The teacher's writing happens in the Common App as usual.

The student-side cover (why you thought of this teacher, themes you hope they'll emphasize, specific moments you remember from class, schools you're applying to, intended major) plus everything we already know about you: your brag sheet free-form fields, top activities ranked, narrative thread, GPA and test scores. The teacher gets one printable page with all of it, plus a confidential section for their own working notes.

Yes. On the prep packet page there's a 'Print or save as PDF' button. The teacher uses the resulting PDF as their reference when they write the actual letter inside the Common App.

When you fill out the invite form on /rec-letters we email the teacher directly from College App Insider with a one-time secure link. If the email doesn't arrive (spam folder, school mail filter), the dashboard shows you the request and you can resend it from there.

Open /rec-letters, find the row, click 'Revoke'. The link stops working immediately. Useful if you sent it to the wrong address or changed your mind about the recommender.

Open /financial/compare (Financial Aid Hub → Compare Aid Letters). Paste each award letter and we normalize the cost-of-attendance, grants, loans, and work-study into the same buckets so you can see them side by side. Aid Hub access requires the Contender plan.

No. Paste the full text of the letter and we run it through a two-pass parser: first a heuristic that picks up labeled dollar amounts, then an intelligent fallback that catches the formats the heuristic misses. Anything we get wrong, you can edit on the row directly. We also tag each row with a parse-confidence chip so you know whether to double-check it.

Net price is cost of attendance minus gift aid (grants and scholarships you do not have to repay). Out-of-pocket is net price minus self-help (federal student loans + work-study) minus Parent PLUS. Net price is what you owe; out-of-pocket is the cash your family writes a check for before any borrowing. Loans reduce out-of-pocket today but they have to be paid back later, so the lower number can be misleading.

PLUS is parent debt, not student debt. Schools sometimes 'meet need' by stacking PLUS into the package, which technically closes the gap but shifts the bill to the parent. The comparison surfaces it so the trade-off is explicit.

It multiplies year-1 out-of-pocket by four. Real-world numbers will vary if costs rise or aid resets each year. If the school's gift aid requires a minimum GPA to renew, mark the row with the threshold so the insights flag the renewal risk.

Yes. The text is sent only to our parser to extract the numbers; it is never used for marketing, training, or shared with any third party. You can delete the row at any time and the raw text goes with it.

Open /decision-day in April or early May, pick the 2-5 schools you're choosing between, and tune sliders for what matters most: cost, career outcomes, fit, distance, selectivity. We re-rank live and surface a side-by-side detail table grounded in the data already in your CAI workspace (saved-school facts, parsed aid letters if you used /financial/compare, intended-major earnings).

No. It is a directional summary weighted by your slider settings. A 7-vs-8 difference is well within the noise of the underlying data; the side-by-side detail rows are the real reason to use the page. We deliberately call it a 'composite' rather than a 'rank'.

If you pasted an aid letter at /financial/compare, we use that out-of-pocket figure (year-1 × 4) so the comparison reflects your actual offer. If no aid letter is on file for a school, we fall back to its published cost of attendance. Pasting all your letters first is the single biggest accuracy improvement you can make.

A heuristic that combines four signals from your profile and brag sheet: intended major matches the school's notable programs, region matches your preferred region, school size matches your size preference, and home-state match. It is intentionally subjective. Treat it as one signal among five, not a verdict.

An Applicant-plan-or-higher button that sends your slate (school list, slider weights, the data behind each composite) to a counselor-style reflection prompt. It will not tell you which school to pick. It will surface the 2-3 tradeoffs the family should talk about this week and end with one open question to sit with overnight. We do not store the reflection.

It records your committed school on your account so the dashboard can shift into 'you're committed — here's what's next.' You can change your mind anytime before May 1 (and after, but you'll have to deposit twice). The pin is private to your household.

We pulled the 2025-26 Common App member-school requirements file. Every deadline, application fee, test policy, and recommendation requirement on /deadlines comes from there. EA II is tracked for the 82 schools that publish it.

Every Monday at 13:00 UTC (8 AM Eastern, 5 AM Pacific). Both parent and student get it if both are opted in. You can turn it off any time at /settings → Email preferences.

An optional browser notification you opt into at /settings → Browser notifications. The same weekly digest fires as a push, with the most-urgent deadline in the title. iOS Safari requires the site be installed to your home screen first.

/settings → Account management → Change password. You'll need your current password as confirmation.

Same place. /settings → Account management → Change email or username. Both fields are optional individually.

/settings → Account management → Delete account. You'll have to type DELETE and confirm with your current password. If you're the household owner, all members lose access. Backups are purged inside 90 days per the privacy policy.

Yes. Use the Export buttons on /portfolio, /brag-sheet, and /compare to download JSON, CSV, or text. We're working on a one-click full-account export.

Free covers 5 schools, deadlines, basic activity list, and the guides library. Applicant ($299/yr) adds essay coaching for 3 essays, the activity builder, recommendation tracker, and the application timeline. Contender ($599/yr) adds unlimited essay coaching, drills, mock interviews, financial aid, the chance predictor, strategy calculator, and decision scenarios. Advantage ($999/yr) adds the personal narrative builder, admissions simulator, mock review, waitlist tools, aid appeal generator, parent dashboard, and career outcomes.

Yes, any time. Downgrades take effect at the end of your current billing term. Your saved data stays put across plan changes.

If the product is not useful within the first 14 days, email hello@collegeappinsider.com for a full refund. After 14 days, you can cancel any time and keep access through the end of the current term.

No. Ever. Our business model is paid subscriptions, not selling lists. We use a small set of essential cookies for sign-in and saved data, and one optional analytics tool to see which features people actually use. Both are documented in the privacy policy.

Account info (email, name, password hash), profile inputs (GPA, scores, state, major interests), saved schools and progress (lives in user_data), email preferences, and consent state. Read /privacy for the full list and retention windows.

Click 'Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information' in the footer, or go to /settings → Cookie preferences. Either reopens the consent panel where you can turn analytics off.