The most serious objection to what we are building, named head-on, with the commitments we make against it.
A paid verification layer could, if built carelessly, advantage the already advantaged: wealthier students have cleaner documentation, more formal internships, more polished organizations, and more ability to pay. We take that objection seriously enough to design against it from day one, publicly, so that we can be held to it.
Any student applying for full financial aid receives large discounts up to a full fee waiver, attested by their school counselor: a certification counselors can make cheaply and credibly.
Evidence tiers attach to claims, never to people. We also maintain an attestation channel for informal, undocumented work such as caregiving and community roles, so the format does not privilege polished, institutional activities.
The endgame is colleges, scholarship programs, and schools funding verification, so that cost never gates a student. Student-pays is the bootstrap, not the destination.
Today, an under-resourced student's genuine achievement often reads as less credible than a wealthy student's packaged one, because credibility currently comes from polish: a professional website, a formal letterhead, an adult network that documents things. A structured evidence process gives the student with real but unpolished work a fair channel to substantiate it, and it takes polish out of the equation by asking one question of every claim equally: what does the evidence support?
We do not claim to have solved admissions inequity. We claim something narrower: that on this dimension, a carefully designed verifier moves the system toward fairness, and a carelessly designed one would move it away. The design choices above are how we intend to stay on the right side of that line, and we invite criticism of them.
If you work in access, counseling, or admissions and see a hole in this design, we genuinely want to hear it: tell us where it breaks.
