Guides · the trust question
Fair question — it's your kid and your money. The short answer: they aren't our numbers. They're the government's, we show the math on everything we compute, and you're the only customer we have. Here's the long answer.
Every price on this site is what families at a specific income band actually paid, as colleges are legally required to report to the U.S. Department of Education (College Scorecard and IPEDS) — not the sticker price, not an average across all families, and not an estimate from a calculator the college runs. Graduation rates, graduate earnings, and student debt come from the same federal reporting. High-school rigor comes from the federal Civil Rights Data Collection's actual coursework records for 24,000+ public schools, supplemented by school-published profiles — each labeled measured, school-reported, or estimate so you always know which you're reading. The data refreshes twice a year, and every page says which refresh it's built on.
When the app says your student has a 60% admit estimate at a school, you can open it: the school's published acceptance rate, plus 10.8 points for a 3.70 GPA against that school's 3.41 typical admit, minus 8.8 for course rigor against a typical applicant — every point visible, every input yours to challenge. Most chancing tools publish a single score from an undisclosed model and carry their own disclaimer that the result "can't be considered 100% accurate." We think the only honest way to publish an estimate is to show where it came from — so that when you disagree with it, you can see exactly what you're disagreeing with.
Most "free" college tools are paid by the colleges recruiting your student. That's not an insult — it's their published business model, and it has documented consequences: the College Board's Student Search Service sold student names to colleges at 47 cents each (Harvard Crimson), and an investigation by the Hechinger Report found scholarship and college-search sites selling student contact information for $1 to over $100 per name (Hechinger Report). College Compass takes no money from colleges, sells no data to anyone, and runs no ads. You pay $99 for a season, once. When accuracy is the entire product and the parent is the only customer, there's exactly one thing we can compete on.
Nobody can predict admissions. There is a human being reading essays at the other end of every application, and institutional priorities no dataset captures. That's why every admit estimate is a range, never a promise — and why we show the math instead of asking you to trust a score.
Averages aren't your family. "Families at your band paid $25,106" is a real, federally reported average for aided families — it is not a quote. Your aid offer can land above or below it, which is exactly why the app decodes your actual award letters in spring and compares them against the benchmark.
Some numbers we won't touch. Application deadlines change yearly and a wrong one is catastrophic, so the app never guesses them — the deadline field is labeled parent-verified, with a one-click link to each school's own site. Above $110,000 of income, federal price reporting stops, so those figures are modeled from each school's published aid policy and say so on the page. Where data doesn't exist, the space stays empty. No number is invented to fill a gap.
Every source is public. Pick any school on this site, open the federal College Scorecard, and compare. If you find a number that doesn't match its source, reply to any email we've ever sent you or write support@collegecompassapp.com — a person reads it, and if you're right, we fix it and thank you.
The best way to judge the numbers is against your own student.
Nine questions, five minutes, and every figure above becomes specific to your family — admit odds with the math shown, your income band's real prices, the season's plan. First three schools free, no account required.