Who pays for SchoolScout
You do. Most free college sites are paid by someone else. Here’s how to tell who, and what it means for the list you build.
Three things to check on any college site
- Who it sells to. If a site is free, look for its pages for colleges, lenders or advertisers. That is usually where the money comes from.
- What the privacy policy says about “sell” and “share”. Search the policy for those two words, and read any box you tick at sign-up. Some let colleges, lenders or military recruiters contact the student.
- Why a school is at the top. Ask whether a school is on the list because it fits the student, or because it paid to be there. Look for “Featured” labels, and for schools shown first with no reason given.
How free college sites make money
Most free college-planning sites are paid by someone on the other side of the student: colleges, lenders or recruiters. The common patterns:
- Some sell student names and profiles to colleges looking for applicants, sometimes for well under a dollar a name.
- Some let colleges pay to appear among a student’s matches.
- Some are run by lenders, and use a free college search to meet future borrowers.
- Some have sign-up boxes that let colleges, lenders or recruiters contact the student.
Most of this is written down, usually in the site’s privacy policy or its pages for colleges. It is how those sites stay free, and it means the list they show a student is shaped, in part, by who is paying.
How SchoolScout is paid
The family pays a one-time fee. No college, lender or recruiter pays us, and none can pay to be on your list or to move up it. The list is built around the student and nothing else.
What we never do
- Sell or share a student’s profile, essays or college list. The only companies that see them are the ones that help run SchoolScout, and our privacy policy names each one.
- Put ad trackers on your pages. The only analytics on the site is Google Analytics, set so it doesn’t collect emails or phone numbers from the page and doesn’t link your visits to Google’s ad profiles. There are no Google Ads, Meta, TikTok or similar tags.
- Let a logo service see your list. School logos come from our own server, so no outside service learns which schools you’re looking at.
- Let anyone train on your data. The companies that process your profile and chats to write SchoolScout’s answers don’t use them to train their models.
The detail, including who those companies are, is in our Privacy Policy. Questions? contact@schoolscout.college
