Financial aid & documents

Aid tracker

Four item types, forms, scholarships, grants and fee waivers, each with an amount, deadline and status. Three totals sit at the top: awarded, in pipeline, and submitted count.

One click adds the four forms every US applicant needs: FAFSA, CSS Profile, application fee waivers and a state grant application, pre-dated to their usual deadlines.

Status

To do → In progress → Submitted → Awarded / Rejected. Tracking an item awards 20 XP; submitting one awards 60, once per item. Open items with deadlines appear on your dashboard radar.

What the product tells you

Run the Net Price Calculator on a school's site before adding it to your list. Every US college is required to publish one. Sticker price is rarely what you pay.
FAFSA opens October 1. Some state grants are first-come, first-served, filing in October versus February is real money.
About 250 mostly-private colleges also require the CSS Profile. It costs money, but fee waivers exist.
Local scholarships have dramatically better odds than national ones. Ask your counselor for the list nobody applies to.
Never pay a service to find scholarships for you.

Document vault

Storage for résumés, test score reports, brag sheets and ID documents. PDF, image or Word, 8 MB maximum, categorised by type. Transcripts are deliberately not in this list: see below.

Who can see your documents

Only you. This is absolute in the current build:

Counselors cannot open them, even for students on their roster.
Contributors cannot open them, at any permission level.
The file route scopes every query by your user id, so a valid document id belonging to someone else simply does not match.
Files are served with Cache-Control: private, no-store.

Storage limitation: files are stored as unencrypted blobs inside the application database. They are protected by access control, not by encryption at rest. A real deployment handling transcripts and government ID needs encryption at rest, a retention policy and audit logging. Do not treat the current build as compliant with any student-records regulation.

Transcripts are the school's record, not yours

Students cannot upload a transcript. A transcript is the document a school issues about a student, so a student-supplied file is not the same artefact and cannot stand in for one. It is filed by a counselor from the console instead.

Stored against the student's user_id, so it travels with their record, but with student_can_see = 0 and uploaded_by set to the counselor.
The student's vault listing filters on student_can_see = 1, and the file route repeats the check, so this is not a hidden button.
uploadDocument rejects kind = 'transcript' outright, because the form is not the boundary.
A counselor can open transcripts only for students on their own roster, enforced by joining through org_id.

Aid tracker

Four item types, forms, scholarships, grants and fee waivers, each with an amount, deadline and status. Three totals sit at the top: awarded, in pipeline, and submitted count.

One click adds the four forms every US applicant needs: FAFSA, CSS Profile, application fee waivers and a state grant application, pre-dated to their usual deadlines.

Status

To do → In progress → Submitted → Awarded / Rejected. Tracking an item awards 20 XP; submitting one awards 60, once per item. Open items with deadlines appear on your dashboard radar.

What the product tells you

Run the Net Price Calculator on a school's site before adding it to your list. Every US college is required to publish one. Sticker price is rarely what you pay.

FAFSA opens October 1. Some state grants are first-come, first-served, filing in October versus February is real money.

About 250 mostly-private colleges also require the CSS Profile. It costs money, but fee waivers exist.

Local scholarships have dramatically better odds than national ones. Ask your counselor for the list nobody applies to.

Never pay a service to find scholarships for you.

Document vault

Storage for résumés, test score reports, brag sheets and ID documents. PDF, image or Word, 8 MB maximum, categorised by type. Transcripts are deliberately not in this list: see below.

Who can see your documents

Only you. This is absolute in the current build:

Counselors cannot open them, even for students on their roster.

Contributors cannot open them, at any permission level.

The file route scopes every query by your user id, so a valid document id belonging to someone else simply does not match.

Files are served with Cache-Control: private, no-store.

Transcripts are the school's record, not yours

Stored against the student's user_id, so it travels with their record, but with student_can_see = 0 and uploaded_by set to the counselor.

The student's vault listing filters on student_can_see = 1, and the file route repeats the check, so this is not a hidden button.

uploadDocument rejects kind = 'transcript' outright, because the form is not the boundary.

A counselor can open transcripts only for students on their own roster, enforced by joining through org_id.