If we cannot support a claim, we do not use it.

Source hierarchy

Six steps. The bottom two do not count.

Every claim is graded by where its evidence sits on a fixed ladder. The higher the rung, the more a claim is allowed to do.

1. Written answers from the aid office itself

   Policies confirmed in writing with the school’s own financial aid or scholarship office, date-stamped. When an office’s answer conflicts with its own published page, we show you both. A disagreement between two official sources is something you deserve to see, not something we pick a winner on.

2. Official school pages

   Financial aid, scholarship, honors, and department pages on the school’s own domain. The standard everything else is measured against.

3. Official state, federal, and provider pages

   State grant agencies, federal aid programs, and scholarship sponsors publishing their own rules.

4. Credible secondary sources

   Reputable reporting that points back to official policy.

5. Forums and parent groupsSignals only

   Reddit threads and parent groups are leads to chase down, not evidence. Nothing publishes on a forum post.

6. AI summariesNever final evidence

   AI helps us search and compare. A claim never ships on an AI summary alone. No exceptions.

The evidence standard

Every number carries its receipt.

Before a number can appear on this site, it has to carry its receipt: the school’s own page it came from, the aid year it applies to, when we last checked it, and the school’s exact wording.

The wording is the school’s, captured word for word — never our paraphrase. 3,617 award entries on our college pages carry one.

Create vs verify

The author never grades its own work.

A single reviewer, human or AI, shares its own blind spots. So every fact here is read from the school’s published policy by one system and independently re-checked against the same source by a separate one before anything can publish.

High-stakes numbers — dollar amounts, GPA and test cutoffs, stacking rules, renewal conditions — additionally require human sign-off. Nothing here is allowed to approve its own work.

Proportionate rigor

Rigor scales with what a number can cost you.

Not every fact deserves the same machinery. The bar rises with the stakes:

The living ledger

12,692 revisions, every one on the record.

Merit policy moves. Schools revise cutoffs, retire awards, and quietly edit stacking pages mid-year. Our records are built to notice. Every change is kept on the record, 12,692 revisions so far as of June 10, 2026.

• Changes are recorded, not overwritten. A revised amount or cutoff leaves a journal entry behind it.
• Stale and conflicting sources get flagged for re-verification. They are not silently kept because the old number was convenient.
• Every college page shows its last-verified date, so you can see how fresh the answer is before you act on it.

The same records power our published research: The State of Merit-Aid Transparency, 2026 reads and classifies the outside-scholarship policies colleges actually publish and shows what they leave out.

Coverage & limits

What we cover and where the edges are.

of public four-year colleges, 307 of 782

39.3%

of private nonprofits, 442 of 1,536

28.8%

of all 2,318 public + nonprofit four-year colleges

32.3%

Denominators are the 782 public and 1,536 private nonprofit four-year degree-granting institutions in NCES Digest Table 317.10 (AY 2022–23). Measured against the list that actually matters, the roughly 880 schools where merit aid can make a meaningful difference, per our internal coverage tracker, coverage is 749 schools, about 85%.

For-profit colleges are excluded on purpose: they are 310 of the 2,628 four-year institutions (11.8%) but enroll only 5.6% of four-year undergraduates (NCES Table 303.70, Fall 2023), and they are not where merit strategy happens.

What this cannot promise

• Policies change mid-year. A school can revise a cutoff in March that we verified in January. Our records flag staleness; they cannot prevent it.
• Conflicts are shown, not smoothed over. When two sources disagree, you see the disagreement instead of the friendlier number.
• Unclear rules stay labeled.When the evidence runs out, we hand you the exact question for the aid office. We don’t fill the gap with a guess.
• None of this guarantees aid.It guarantees you’re deciding from sourced numbers, labeled honestly.