Frequently Asked Questions

Cap to Quad is a college discovery platform with tools that help students explore hundreds of U.S. colleges and universities on an interactive map. You can browse schools, build a personalized shortlist, compare schools side by side, share research with your family and advisors, and get personalized recommendations — all in one place.

Sign up using your existing Google account, and you're in. There's a five-day free trial period, no credit card required, so you can explore the full set of tools before committing.

Both! The tool is designed for students to explore on their own, but parents and counselors are welcome and encouraged to use it, too. Each account is individual, so students and parents can each have their own shortlists or save and share their own reports.

When you sign up, you get access to every feature for a limited trial period. While it's not unlimited use, you can explore all the tools and get a good feel for how the platform works. When the trial ends, you can choose to subscribe to keep using the tool or simply let the account lapse.

There's a countdown banner on the app homepage showing how much time you have left in your trial, so you'll know before your trial expires. If you don't subscribe, since you haven't given a credit card, there is nothing to cancel and no risk of being charged. Your account and saved data will remain in case you return later, but you won't be able to access the platform until you subscribe.

Yes. There are no long-term contracts for individual users. Cancel whenever you like from the Account Settings screen. You'll still retain access through the end of your current billing period, at which point your access will automatically turn off.

Your data (favorites, preferences, saved reports) will remain dormant on our servers even after cancellation unless you specifically contact us to request deletion. This is to ensure that you can always access it later if you choose to resubscribe without having to start over. Nobody else will have access to your data, and it will not be shared with any third parties.

Not yet, but we're exploring options for how we might implement this in the future. Reach out via the contact page and we'll keep you posted.

It's simple! Click the heart icon on any school's profile to add it to your favorites. Your favorites are saved to your account so you can access them anytime, from any device. Saving favorite schools is the first step toward enabling other Cap to Quad capabilities — helping you find the perfect fit for you.

Yes. We call these side-by-side views “comparison reports” in Cap to Quad. Select up to four schools from your list of favorites and generate a comparison report with key data points laid out side by side — academics, cost, demographics, and more. You decide the schools and the factors that you wish to see and compare.

As a subscriber, you have two different ways to share reports with family, friends, and academic advisors. First, you can save and export your reports as PDF files that can easily be shared offline. You can also get a shareable link that you can put in a text or email, which anybody can open and view in Cap to Quad, even if they are not members themselves.

Cap to Quad's recommendations are based on two things: the schools you've already saved as favorites, and a set of weighted criteria drawn from each school's statistics. You can adjust those relative weights with sliders to emphasize what matters most to you — or leave our defaults. Based on your preferences, we'll always surface three schools you might not have considered.

We have an easy answer for this: there is zero AI involved in the school recommendations that we make to our users. Our proprietary recommendation engine is entirely deterministic and algorithmic — it's complicated math for sure, but still just math all the same.

We recognize that most of our users are high school students, and many of them will likely use school-provided email addresses to log in. Most schools have email firewalls that block external communication to protect their students. We respect this and prefer to provide our own internal messaging system to facilitate communication while keeping the privacy of schools and their students intact.

Cap to Quad makes it easy for students to explore schools beyond the usual suspects. Our interactive map helps them discover colleges in regions they hadn't considered, and the comparison tools let you discuss options together with real data — not just rankings or reputation.

Each Cap to Quad account is individual with its own data, so you cannot directly see your child's favorites. But students can share their shortlists with you via shareable links to all of their comparison reports, making it easy to collaborate on college research without sharing login credentials.

Absolutely! Cap to Quad is designed to be intuitive and approachable. Students as early as freshman and sophomore year can use the map to start exploring and building awareness of their options. A common mistake for families and students is to wait too long to start their search process. Finding the right college is important and takes time. Starting early helps students think critically and make informed decisions. The tools will grow with them as their search becomes more focused.

This is not possible yet, but we are working on this feature. Because subscriptions are paid at the time of sign-up or login by the user, we will need to implement a gift card or sharing feature. If you are interested in this option, you can reach us from the Contact page and we will keep you informed.

Yes. College counselors and academic advisors should recommend Cap to Quad to their students as a supplement to traditional college research. It's especially effective for helping students break out of their comfort zone, discovering and considering schools they might otherwise overlook.

For now, and until we launch our institutional features, you can request that your students share their favorites and comparison reports with you through the platform's shareable links. In fact, to view such links, you do not even require your own Cap to Quad account — shared reports can be viewed in your browser by anyone with the link.

We are actively working on institutional and school-district licensing options, and anticipate this will become available in the near future. If you're interested, reach out through the sales channel on the Contact page and we'll put you on the notification list.

Not yet at this time. Students sign up individually with their Google accounts. Once we have institutional licensing options available, we expect to support counselor-managed rosters as well as counselor-specific account types with dashboard tools to allow tracking and support of your students' academic journeys.

We include hundreds of accredited colleges and universities across the United States. If your school isn't listed and you'd like it to be, reach out through the Contact page and we'll look into adding it.

Each school profile includes key data points sourced from annual IPEDS and Common Data Set filings, such as enrollment, demographics, acceptance rates, tuition, and financial aid statistics. We also include narrative fields about the school, academic strengths, campus, and student life that are carefully curated using public information sourced from recognized and reputable sites to capture what makes each school unique.

Yes. If you notice outdated or inaccurate statistical information, contact us through the Contact page. We'll review your new filings and update the data as needed. Please note that we do not modify our narrative presentations of schools based directly upon institutional request or feedback.

Our data comes from publicly available sources, including the Common Data Set (CDS) and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). We update regularly to keep information current. If a field in our app shows as “not reported,” it does not mean the information does not exist; it may simply not be available from these highly reputable and accountable sources. Our preference is to maximize accuracy and transparency in the information we provide.

While we do use local, open-source AI to assist in the creation of our narrative content, we ensure that all information is accurate and transparent. All such content is produced with human oversight and is strictly built using college fact briefs created by us. The briefs consist of a combination of verified factual data and information from widely recognized and reputable sites and sources. We do not ever use public AI models (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT), nor do we use any of our own data or our users' data to train models. Because our AI use is strictly run and hosted on local machines, our work does not depend upon data centers and causes no environmental impact. And we do not ever use AI to create misleading or harmful content.

We collect only what's needed to run your account: your Google-provided name, email, and profile photo. We never share your information with third parties, sell your data, or run algorithms to profile you (or your child/student).

Yes. Reach out through the Contact page to request full account deletion and we'll take care of it promptly.

Cap to Quad works best on the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Brave, and Edge.

We put substantial effort into ensuring that Cap to Quad is responsive for multiple devices. It is optimized for desktop and tablet browsers, but all features also work on mobile devices. You can also use the native Add to Home Screen feature on your iOS and Android devices.

We'd love to hear from you! If you have found a typo or other mistake on this site, please use the Contact page to report it to us. Once you have signed into the app, the best option to report bugs and request features is through the in-app Send Feedback screen that can be accessed from the menu. Every feature we've built started with feedback from real users like you.