Frequently asked questions
Straight answers about what this is, what it costs, and where the numbers come from.
- Is Planning4College really free?
- Yes. The matcher, the college pages, net price figures, the side-by-side comparison and the loan calculator are all free, and the matcher needs no account at all — you can answer the questionnaire and get your shortlist without giving us an email address. An optional free account exists only so your saved list and notes follow you between devices. There is no paid tier and nothing is held back behind a signup.
- Do you sell my data?
- No. We do not sell personal data, and we collect as little as the tools can run on — the audience includes minors, and that shapes what we are willing to store. The matcher works without an account. If you create one, what we keep is your email address, the college IDs you saved, and whatever you typed into your own private notes. The optional income-range question is used to estimate your cost more accurately and is not stored on our servers.
- How are matches made?
- You answer a short questionnaire: your budget after aid, your grades and test scores, what you want to study, how far from home you will go, how big a campus you want, and the campus-life factors that matter to you. Every college is scored against those answers across those dimensions, and the shortlist comes back grouped into match, safety and reach. Each card shows the net price you would actually pay after grants and scholarships rather than the published tuition, and lists the specific reasons it was matched to you — including the unflattering ones, such as a school being a long shot or over your budget.
- Is this a ranking site?
- No. We publish no "best colleges" list and no overall scores. A ranking tells you which school did best on somebody else’s weighting of prestige, selectivity and spending, which is not the question a family is asking. The useful question is which colleges fit this student, at this budget, for this subject — and the honest answer is different for every family, so there is no single ordering to publish.
- Who is behind Planning4College?
- Planning4College is operated by Planning4College LLC, a company registered in Massachusetts. We are a small, independent operation — not a publisher, not a ranking service, and not owned by or affiliated with any college, lender or admissions consultancy. No college can pay to appear in your results, to rank higher within them, or to be described more favourably; there are no sponsored placements and no advertising from institutions.
- Where does the data come from?
- From the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard — the federal dataset collected from institutions directly. That covers cost and net price, admissions, enrolment, fields of study, median earnings, median debt and repayment. Where a college reports no figure we say so rather than estimating one, and where a figure is an average across all students we label it as an average, because your own cost depends on your circumstances.
Still wondering something?
The about page goes into why we built this and what we will and will not do. Anything else, just ask us — a person reads every message.