How we research, source and update our guides.
Students make expensive decisions on the strength of pages like these. This is how ours are put together, so you can judge whether to trust them.
Where the facts come from
Every figure, deadline and policy in a guide comes from the organisation that sets it: a university's own financial aid pages, the College Board, UCAS, the US embassy in Accra, or the scholarship programme itself. We link to that source rather than to an article about it.
We do not source facts from other consultants' blogs, from forum threads, or from a search summary. If we cannot find a primary source for a claim, the claim comes out of the guide.
What we will not publish
We do not publish acceptance odds we cannot show the working for, aid figures a university has not stated, or advice that depends on misrepresenting a family's finances.
We do not promise admission, funding or a visa anywhere on this site. No advisor controls those decisions, and a guide that implies otherwise is doing the reader harm.
Dating and re-checking
Each guide carries a "last checked" date rather than a publication date, because what matters to a reader is whether someone has looked at it since the deadlines moved.
The date changes only when a person has opened every source and confirmed it still says what the guide says it says. Fixing a typo does not move the date. Aid deadlines and scholarship terms change most years, so guides in the scholarships and financial aid hubs are re-checked before each application season.
Who writes them
Every guide carries a named author with a page of their own, so you can see who is telling you this and what they have done. No guide goes out under a company byline or a pen name.
Guides are written by the advisor who does that work with students, not by a writer summarising the internet.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. Corrections that change the substance of a guide are noted on the page rather than quietly edited in.
We would rather be told bluntly and early than have a student act on something we got wrong.
Money and independence
Families pay us directly. We take no commission from universities, agents or scholarship programmes, and nothing on this site is sponsored or paid for by a third party.
Guides link to our own services where they are genuinely the next step, and they say plainly when doing it yourself is the better option. A guide that recommends a service is still written to be useful to someone who never buys one.
Found something wrong? Tell us.
Bring it to a free call or send it to the WhatsApp group. We would rather fix it than have a student act on it.
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