How this site is written, who writes it, what we will not publish, and how to tell us we got something wrong.
Who writes what, and where a credential applies
This site covers two quite different subjects, and we handle authorship differently for each because the honest position is different.
Paying for college
Content on financial aid, scholarships, student loans, college costs and choosing a school is written or reviewed by Cherisse Skeete.
That credential is genuinely relevant to some of this material and not to all of it. Education tax credits, 529 tax treatment, how income and assets are counted, and what appears on a 1098-T sit squarely inside it. Admissions processes and outcomes data do not. Where the credential does not apply, the page carries a reviewer line rather than a sole byline, and we say so on the page rather than letting the credential imply expertise it does not cover.
School and family life
Content on school choice, learning support, homework, wellbeing and getting ready for what comes next is written and maintained by Charles Slocs.
No professional credential is claimed for this material, because none applies. We could put letters after a name here and it would mean nothing about whether the article on bullying is any good. An unrelated qualification on a byline is worse than no qualification, because it invites you to trust something it has no bearing on.
What stands in for a credential is the process: sourcing to federal and state education authorities, describing how systems actually work rather than what we think you should do, and a hard line against telling you anything about your own child. That is set out in how we check our figures.
We use AI to draft, and we are telling you
Articles on this site are drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by a person before publication. We disclose this because a number of sites in this space do the same and describe it as human research.
The disclosure matters less than the constraints. There are three things the drafting process is not permitted to do, and they are enforced in the software rather than left to a reviewer’s attention:
- It cannot write a number. Every figure on the money side of this site is inserted from records that a person has sourced and dated. Where a draft refers to a figure we have not verified, that passage is removed before publication. There is no path by which a plausible-sounding invented amount reaches the page.
- It cannot state one side of a split figure as the whole answer. Since 1 July 2026 many federal figures differ depending on when a borrower’s loans were disbursed. A draft that gives one of them as the answer is rejected outright, because that error reads perfectly and would mislead roughly half of the people who found the page.
- It cannot tell you anything about your child. No signs, no likelihoods, no “this may mean”. Not as a hedge and not in a list. Content about learning differences and student wellbeing describes what schools and clinicians assess and how to get an evaluation, and stops there.
What we will not publish
- Any figure we have not checked against a source and dated.
- Any statement that a reader will be admitted, approved, or receive a particular amount. Nobody can promise those.
- Telephone numbers for aid offices or loan servicers. Impersonation of those numbers is an active fraud and we will not risk being the site that sent you to the wrong one.
- Any diagnosis, treatment or medication guidance.
- Invented statistics, surveys or studies.
- Recommendations of a specific school, lender, servicer, scholarship service or product.
We do name scam practices — advance fees, guaranteed-award offers, paid scholarship searches, fee-charging forgiveness services, diploma mills — because a page warning readers about fraud that cannot describe the fraud has failed. When we name one, we say plainly that it is fraudulent, and we never explain how it is done.
Corrections
When we get something wrong we fix it, and where the error was material we say what changed rather than quietly editing the page.
If you spot an error, please tell us at our contact page. Corrections to published figures are the most useful thing anyone sends us. If you administer a programme we have described incorrectly, we would particularly like to hear from you — you will know before we do.
Independence
Some links on this site earn us a commission. What that does and does not change is set out in the affiliate disclosure. The short version: it has no bearing on any figure, comparison, ordering or decision about what we cover.