Your story belongs to you.

This notice describes the College Café product implemented in this repository. Institution contracts, regional legal terms, retention schedules, and service-provider agreements must be finalized for a production deployment.

One account. Clear workspace boundaries.

Each family, school, and university has a separate workspace. We store your account name and email, authenticated sessions, workspace membership, the content you create, and records of security and consent actions. Membership does not automatically grant access to a student’s private records.

Choose your supporters.

Students can share their profile, application plan, tasks, and entered aid offers with parents and counselors in their workspace. They can revoke that permission. Essays, interview transcripts, simulations, and research responses are excluded from those sharing grants. Private application checklists, recommendation preparation and contact details, activities and honors, and consulting conversations are also excluded. My plan collects only your own dates and next steps; a calendar or résumé you download stays under your control until you share the file.

Advising stays within your school.

School staff can keep case notes and follow-up records in their institution workspace. Linking a student to an advising case does not give staff access to that student’s private writing, interviews or activity drafts. Staff access ends when the relevant workspace membership or role is removed.

Build a story. Choose when to share it.

Longitudinal milestones are private until the student selects them for a portfolio snapshot or admissions discovery. Discovery shares name, grade, academic interest, biography, and featured milestones with verified admissions workspaces. It excludes private grades, test scores, financial data, essays, interview transcripts, simulations, and study responses. Students can opt out. Portfolio links expire after 30 days and can be revoked earlier; people who receive a link may retain their own copy.

Community is a shared space.

Member introductions are separate from admissions profiles. An introduction is private until you choose to show it to members of its workspace. Profile pictures are also private by default, with a separate option to show them to active members of the same workspace. Uploads are resized and re-encoded to remove embedded metadata. Pictures do not automatically appear in another workspace, admissions discovery, or public portfolio links. You can replace or remove your picture and withdraw introduction sharing in Settings and People & profiles.

Posts, comments, circle participation, and event registrations are visible to members of the relevant community. Private planning records do not move into the community. Choose what you post carefully, respect other participants, and use the report control when content needs review.

AI is optional support.

When configured and explicitly requested, Anthropic processes your selected material for admissions consulting, essay feedback, interview coaching, scenario review, and questionnaire pilots. Account exports and private community history are not automatically included. Provider credentials are held on the server. College Café does not infer emotion, personality, or protected characteristics from an interview. Browser dictation is optional; your browser’s speech provider may process microphone audio when you enable it. Typed practice is always available.

Workspace billing is private.

If billing is enabled, Stripe handles hosted checkout, payment details and invoices. College Café stores the workspace’s customer and subscription references, purchase-policy confirmation and payment-event metadata. Card details remain with Stripe. Only current workspace owners can see or manage billing in College Café; being a parent or school staff member does not grant that access by itself. Financial record retention and account closure follow the deployed service’s approved purchase policy.

Research needs permission.

Student Voice collects study-specific consent before saving a response. Participants can withdraw their response. Institution insights require at least five responses. Synthetic questionnaire pilots use fictional perspectives and are labeled accordingly; they are excluded from real response counts. Consented study data is never included in admissions discovery.

Admission simulations are exploratory.

Scenario results use stated assumptions and published institution-level data. They are not calibrated individual admission probabilities, eligibility decisions, or university endorsements. No admissions decisions are automated by College Café.

Your data and your account.

Download your own workspace records and consent history from Settings & privacy. You can delete your drafts and milestones, withdraw research responses, revoke sharing and portfolio links, and turn off discovery. Contact the deployed service operator for full account deletion, institutional records requests, or access questions. Audit and consent records require a documented retention policy.

For students aged 13 and older.

Accounts require confirmation that the account holder is at least 13. Schools and universities must establish appropriate authority, guardian involvement, and service agreements before using the product with students. This codebase is not a certification of FERPA, COPPA, GDPR, or other legal compliance.

Sources and service providers.

College data comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard and ROR, with global coverage based on QS’s 2027 top-100 list. Maps load tiles from OpenStreetMap. Account email can be configured through Resend. College statistics may refer to different reporting years; verify current requirements directly with each university.