About us & methodology

Scholastic Leaders is an independent project run by the Scholastic Leaders editorial team. It is not affiliated with any college, lender, scholarship sponsor or government agency, and no college pays to be listed or ranked. We aren't financial aid administrators or immigration lawyers. That's why every number links back to the government data or the college document it came from, so you can check it yourself.

Found a mistake? Report it. Every report is read, and corrections go into the next data update.

• College Scorecard (cost of attendance, net price, admissions): refreshed with each federal release. Current: release of 2026-06-10, cost year 2024-25.
• IPEDS student financial aid: refreshed when NCES publishes a new final file. Current: 2022-23.
• Common Data Sets: rechecked each admissions cycle. Last checked 2026-10-15.
• Scholarship and fellowship listings: rechecked against each official page. Each listing shows the date we last checked it.
• Site data last updated: 2026-10-15.

• Not a seller of guaranteed scholarships, visas, admission, essay ghostwriting or paid applications.
• Not a provider of admission odds. We don't show invented percentages.
• Not a substitute for official university pages, financial aid offices, immigration counsel or application portals.
• We never charge a fee to apply for any scholarship. See the FTC's guidance on avoiding scholarship scams.

Records come from official university and sponsor pages, or from consistent current-cycle reports that cite them. Each one is labeled Official source, Reported — confirm on official page or Not verified — check with the university, with the date we checked it.

Listing verification (last automated check 2026-10-15). A listing is verified only when its official page, as we fetched it, shows the current or next cycle (2026-27 / 2027), a future or rolling deadline, the study level and who can apply. Only verified listings appear as open in matches, on the homepage and in default search results. Everything else is labeled and hidden by default.

• Curated funding records (43): 1 verified, 30 need review, 4 archived (official page shows only past cycles), 8 closed for this cycle. 10 were originally entered from the official page.
• EducationUSA listings (263): 4 verified, 214 need review, 44 archived (past cycle only), 1 closed.

“Needs review” usually means the official page blocks automated checks, or doesn't state a dated deadline or current cycle. It does not mean the program is fake; it means we haven't confirmed it.

International aid policies: we have hand-checked 49 universities. 27 have a sourced policy (3 read on the official page, 24 reported by sources that cite it); the other 22 are still in review and show “Not verified”. Labels such as “need-blind for internationals” (10 schools) are counted only from those 27 sourced policies, so the two numbers never overlap.

Public data: 1,944 currently operating, predominantly bachelor's-granting U.S. institutions from the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard (Most-Recent-Cohorts institution file, released Jun 10, 2026): admit rate, SAT/ACT middle-50% ranges, cost of attendance (2024–25), tuition, net price by family income, Pell share, graduation rate, median earnings and debt, enrollment and nonresident (international) share. Where we also have a curated record, our sourced international-aid and test policies take precedence. Reach/target/likely labels are rough indicators from published ranges, never admission odds.

• Cost of attendance and net price by income band: U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard.
• Aid rates and averages (any aid, grants, Pell, state, institutional, federal loans): IPEDS Student Financial Aid survey 2022-23, 1,920 schools. Imputed values are dropped. IPEDS doesn't separate need-based from merit aid.
• Common Data Set: we checked 181 schools among those with the most international students. Aid to nonresidents (H6) is marked verified at 67 schools, where recipients × average award matches the total within 3%. Need and merit aid (H2/H2A) passes our consistency checks at 48 schools. Most PDFs (157) were read from the College Transitions CDS archive, a mirror of the schools' own files, and are labeled “mirror”; 10 came from school websites.
• When a figure isn't verified, we say so and show the full cost instead of guessing an aid amount.

Essay/SOP feedback and optional “Explain with AI” match explanations are processed by Google's Gemini API. On Google's free tier, inputs may be used by Google to improve its products, so please don't include sensitive personal information in drafts. AI never decides eligibility, never writes or rewrites your essay, and falls back to an offline rubric when it is unavailable or a daily limit is reached.

Matching uses deterministic rules (citizenship, level, GPA on its own scale, deadlines) and a transparent 100-point ranking: funding fit 30, relevance 25, source confidence 20, deadline 15, effort 10. The score helps you sort your list. It is not a probability.

AI is used only to give rubric feedback on drafts you wrote and to phrase explanations of facts already in our records. It can't change eligibility or invent amounts.

For users 13 and older. We collect only what matching needs, and never passports, government IDs, tax returns, bank statements or account passwords. Essays are saved only if you choose. You can export or delete your data from your account.

Checklist items about the I-20, SEVIS and F-1 visas are general guidance with links to Study in the States (DHS) and travel.state.gov. They are not legal advice. F-1 and other temporary student categories are not eligible for U.S. federal student aid (studentaid.gov).