Guidance built from evidence, not from a form.
Every 11th and 12th grader gets what a well-resourced family buys: the real price of college for their family, the deadlines that decide whether money arrives, and an application assembled from what they have actually done. Built from the school's own records, at a per-student price the school pays.
Families are never billed. The school pays per student, and the student keeps the record.
A number a student sees on her first day
36institutions where a family earning under $30,000 pays nothing at all — after aid, on average. Four of them are within sixty miles of her school.
Source. U.S. Department of Education, College Scorecard — Most Recent Cohorts, Institution. Retrieved June 2026. Net price by family income bracket, 4,946 of 6,273 institutions reporting.
Every student gets a twin. It is hers.
Not a tool the school runs on her. A twin that learns about one person — her — from what she has actually done, and works in nobody else's interest. It is not trained on other students, because nothing here is trained at all: the pattern is worked out from her own record, for her, at the moment she needs it.
It notices things she has not noticed about herself. The thread running through four unrelated corners of her life. The thing she is good at that nobody has said out loud.
And it brings her the world, in her own context. The scholarship that fits her record rather than the thousand that do not. The programme two towns over she had never heard of. The college where her family pays nothing, six miles from her school.
It does not predict her future or promise her one. It shows her what is genuinely within reach, with the real numbers underneath — so the question stops being whether she is good enough, and becomes which door she wants to walk through.
The school pays for it. The record is hers, and she keeps it.
The requirement is already in the building.
Four states now make financial-aid filing a condition of graduation or of leaving school. Completion rates are published by district. The question has moved from whether a school should help a student file, to how a school proves it did.
Counselor caseloads make one-to-one aid advising impossible at that scale. GPS for Life does the remembering and the arithmetic so a counselor's hour goes to the conversation.
- ConnecticutClass of 2027 — this year's seniors. No diploma without a completed FAFSA, the state alternative, or a signed waiver.
- New JerseyClasses of 2026 and 2027. A counselor may authorise the waiver for a student who cannot obtain a parent.
- New YorkEvery senior completes FAFSA, TAP or a waiver, with notification duties on the school.
- MassachusettsCompletion rates published for every district, by school.
Sources. Connecticut Public Act 24-45 §§9–10. New Jersey P.L.2021 c.192. New York Education Law §663-a. Massachusetts DESE district reporting. Verified September 2026.
What a student gets for an enrolment roster.
No transcript. No teacher observations. No activity records. An identifier, a grade and a school — a file most districts can export this afternoon — and these four are live.
What college actually costs her family
Net price by family income bracket across 6,273 institutions, not the sticker price. She finds her family's own row. We never ask for, store, or infer a household income.
Source. College Scorecard, June 2026. Shown with its retrieval date on every figure.
Every deadline that carries money
Her state and her grade, ordered by what to do rather than by which date is nearest. A state that publishes no deadline is shown as one to ask about, never given an invented date.
Coverage. 54 sourced deadline definitions across 51 states and the District of Columbia, for the 2027–28 cycle.
Scholarships she is actually eligible for
A curated, dated catalogue — not a search engine. Each entry re-read on the sponsor's own page, and refused from the list entirely if its date has passed rather than shown as stale.
Maintenance. Every entry carries the date a person last opened the sponsor's page. Re-verification runs daily.
What the FAFSA will ask, before she sits down
Who has to be in the room — which divorced parent, a stepparent, a parent with no Social Security number — what each needs, and which tax year. Plus a private route for the student whose parent will not or cannot take part.
Source. Federal Student Aid published guidance. Pell maximum $7,395 for 2026–27; Direct Loan 6.52%; Parent PLUS 9.07%. Verified September 2026.
The no-parent route is invisible to a parent account — enforced by database policy, not by the screen declining to draw it. In a school of 1,600 that student exists, and today nothing finds her.
A pattern is only claimed when the evidence converges.
No single grade, score or club may ever produce a direction. That rule is enforced in the database, not stated as a principle — a candidate drawing on only one part of a student's life is refused, whatever its score.
Courses and transcript
AP Physics C, second year of engineering design
What a teacher noticed
“Rebuilt the arm control loop after three failed attempts. Then taught the method to the younger build team.”
What she does
Robotics club, grades 9–11 · competition gripper build
What she says herself
“I like the part where it doesn't work yet.”
Gate: 0 independent domains — refused
Robotics controls, showing up in four independent parts of your life.
It reads the record the school already keeps
Transcript and course history. What teachers and counselors write down. Clubs, projects, service, work. And what the student says about herself, in her own words, which is the one source no district exports.
Every record carries where it came from: supplied by the school, said by a person, or concluded by the system. An inference can never quietly become a school fact.
It refuses to conclude from one thing
A strong grade is not a direction. Nor is a club, nor a test score. The pattern is claimed only when the same thread appears in parts of a life that had no reason to agree — and the screen shows her which pieces it rests on.
It turns that into what to do next
Fields and colleges her own evidence points to, chosen to widen rather than narrow: at least three distinct field families, and a ladder of institutions from the cheapest after aid to the hardest door.
Her activities list assembles itself in the Common App's format, each line showing the entries it rests on so a counselor can vouch for it. Essay material stays in her own words — never an essay written for her.
Four places your district's data can live.
This is the first decision, before any conversation about which data you share. We operate the first today. The others we build with you — design, deployment and a support agreement — and we will not put a date on this page for work we have not scoped with a district.
Hosted by us, shared infrastructure
Your data sits alongside other districts', separated by row-level security rather than by hardware. You control which categories are shared at all, and can withdraw any of them.
Operating todayYour own database, your own keys
A separate instance, encrypted with keys held in your key management service. Withdrawing the key makes the data unreadable — including to us.
Requires an engagementDeployed into infrastructure you own
GPS for Life runs inside your district's own cloud account. The account, the network boundary and the audit logs are yours, first-hand. We hold a scoped deploy role and no standing read access.
Requires an engagementEntirely on your own hardware
Open-weights models on machines you run. Nothing student-derived leaves the building at all. Pattern-finding already runs locally today; only the written explanation calls out.
Requires an engagementNever used to train a modelThere is no cross-student training corpus, because there is no training step. The pattern-finding is computed per student, from that student's own evidence, at the moment it is needed.
Never sold, never advertised againstNot to a data broker, not to a recruiter, not to a college. No advertising appears anywhere in the product, and none is sold against what the system infers.
Never texts, location or browsingNever a minor's home address — distance is measured from the school. Never a family's income — the family finds its own bracket on the screen.
Built for four people who need different things.
Each of them sees only what they are meant to see — decided in the database, not by the screen.
Superintendents
The compliance picture, the pilot shape, the data agreement, and what it costs to run.
Counselors
Who needs action this week, who asked for help, and activity lists ready to vouch for.
Students
What college really costs, which deadlines carry money, and a record of what you have done.
Parents
The same deadlines and dollar figures your child sees — and a clear account of what you do not see.
A one-semester pilot, starting with FAFSA season.
One or two high schools, grades 11–12, with your counseling lead as sponsor. We measure one thing against your own baseline: completion and documented waivers. Deadlines met and counselor hours saved are secondary. Convert to a district agreement if the numbers move.
Paid per student by the school. Families are never billed, and a lapsed subscription never deletes a record.