How We Source This

Nobody behind College Intel is a former admissions officer or a certified counselor. So the trust this site asks for doesn't rest on a title — it rests on where every number actually comes from, checked one at a time. This page is that standard, made explicit.

The rule: official sources only

Every stat in every article — admit rates, financial aid figures, scholarship amounts, credit-transfer policies — traces back to the school's own official page, its Common Data Set, a federal dataset like the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard, or a named primary source such as a student newspaper of record. Not an admissions-consulting blog, and not a number rounded or rephrased to sound more precise than the source actually supports. If we can't find the number stated by the school or the government itself, we say so instead of estimating.

What happens when a popular number turns out to be wrong

A widely circulated figure for Fairfield University claimed a 79.8% Early Decision admit rate against a 33.3% Regular Decision rate. It doesn't hold up — Fairfield's own reporting puts its combined early admit rate at 28% for the Class of 2030. The 79.8% number appears to be an error that got copied across several admissions-consulting sites, the kind of thing that spreads because it sounds specific enough to trust. Our Early Decision acceptance-rate article flags it directly rather than repeating it — that's the standard for every stat on this site, not a one-time correction.

If a school doesn't report something

Some schools don't publish every field — a specific scholarship amount, a program-level acceptance rate, a current-cycle deadline. When that happens, the article says the data isn't available rather than filling the gap with a plausible-sounding guess. A number that looks confident but isn't real is worse than an honest gap, because it's the kind of thing a reader might actually plan around.

Why this matters to us

College Intel is being built together with three cousins while they're actually in the middle of college admissions — the conflicting advice, the same recycled stats repeated until they sounded true, no honest “chance me” tool that didn't want an account or hand back a confident-looking guess, and the financial side nearly impossible to pin down clearly, all happening in real time rather than remembered after the fact. They wanted one real place to find answers instead of piecing it together across a dozen half-trustworthy sites. That's the standard this page describes: real numbers, real sources, and an honest “we don't know” when that's the accurate answer instead of a guess.

Questions or corrections

If a number looks wrong, email support@fuselyn.com with the school and the figure — the same way the Fairfield error above got caught. See About College Intel for who builds this and how the underlying school data refreshes.