Don’t know where to start?  Here are two great resources that put financial fit at the center of the college search so that, no matter where you choose to go to college, you will graduate into a financially stable young adult life.

SimpliCollege makes navigating the college process simple at a price that anyone can afford ($5/month is about as close to free as you can get these days).  By providing a roadmap that is easy to follow, SimpliCollege helps students and families minimize stress throughout the process and empowering clear, confident, and proud participants in the college journey and beyond.

The SFC Learning Center is a FREE resource provided by Strategies for College for families during the college discovery process and provides answers to common questions. These courses educate parents about the process and demystify the steps to finding a perfect college academically, emotionally and with financial feasibility.

What’s next after high school?  Before you assume anything, take some time to consider the full range of options for “What’s next.”

Crash Course is a board game that challenges players to navigate their first college semester, balancing academics. relationships, stress, money, and a few surprises. It’s a fantastic way to start a deeper conversation about succeeding in college and finding the right fit.

At The Core’s powerful self assessment and career guidance for teens goes beyond online quizzes and snap judgments. Through a series of one-on-one interviews with a trained facilitator, students identify their strongest personal traits, strengths, challenges, preferences, and values so they can make better choices about college, career, and life.

Your path to training, practical education and career growth, change and options that do not require a traditional four-year college program begins here. From HVAC repair to high-level software coding and development, we help you get the training and preparation you need. Connect with educational and training providers that will get you right to work.

The whole point of going to college is so that after you graduate, you are better off.  Graduate from college with a boatload of debt, and that won’t happen.  In addition to TuitionFit (just in case you’ve forgotten, that’s the site where you are right now!), here are a couple of other free tools.

Quatromoney is a revolutionary new platform designed to help families make all 4 years of college costs more manageable in advance. Use your price to find the right balance between savings, cash from income, and financing to maximize affordability.

Their Free College Money Report is a free way to get critical insights into how different types of colleges and universities will interpret your financial situation and assess how much they think you can afford to pay before you dive down the college search rabbit hole.  Be aware that the free money report will likely come with a follow up call from a financial advisor that uses the College Aid Pro software, but the free part of the resource is reason enough to use it, even if you decide to “gently” decline a solicitation from a financial planner.

Meritmore is another free tool that enables quick access to projected college and university pricing utilizing US Dept of Education data and institutional scholarship data.  They also offer several pretty useful tools for organization the college application process and appealing for more financial aid.

Here are some of best tools to maximize private scholarship money and student loans that use the power of number to drive down interest rates.

ScholarshipOwl dramatically speeds up your scholarship application time. They match you with the awards that fit your personality, grades, lifestyle, and more. Then they use your initial application to give you a head start in applying to other scholarships of your choice.  PLUS, they list many scholarships that don’t require an essay at all! 

Not only does Imagine Scholarships help you find private scholarships and other financial resources, they empower, educate and inspire students and families as they travel through each step of the college admissions process. Imagine the possibilities, explore the options and arrive at your desired destination.

The Scholarship System is all about strategies to help students and their families pay for college. They’ve created a step-by-step process to teach ANY STUDENT how to secure college funding, saving families more than $1.2 million so far.

By putting individual students together and making banks compete for the whole group, Juno gets you access to the cheapest private student loans anywhere.  And they will back that claim up with this: if by some miracle you find a lower private student loan, they will beat it with cash.

OnToCollege Test Prep provides all the content, motivation, and strategies necessary to increase test scores and scholarship dollars, ensuring students become two- or four-year college graduates with minimal debt.

At NCSA, our firsthand knowledge of college athletics, combined with our advanced online technology, expansive college coach network and proven recruiting methods, helps you take control of the recruiting experience and find your best college options.

Volunteering can change your life and the lives of others.  Their FREE app helps you find, request, and track volunteer projects for your college application so you can show the full depth and breadth of who you really are.

In an era of online and impersonal test prep tools, FinnPrep succeeds because we apply an approach that is tried and true: students learn more and learn faster from an in-person teacher who knows them and cares about their academic progress.

Find the best colleges for you by creating a custom college list.  One of the best under-the-radar sites for insights on how to use data (instead of just anecdotes or reputations) to find colleges that are both affordable AND educationally effective.

College Navigator might not be the sexiest college search tool, but it’s got the most complete set of data.  After all, College Navigator is run by the US Department of Education, and their data is what everyone else uses anyway. So you might as well go to the source, right?

Many students have developed a unique combination of talents, traits, and skills.  But how do you find out which colleges and universities will reward your specific attributes and aptitudes with scholarship money?  The Merit Scholarship List gives you an exhaustive catalog of the myriad of merit scholarships offered by specific higher education institutions.

The College Scorecard from the US Department of Education provides some useful data on salaries by field of study from individual colleges and universities. Although there are some good reasons to not put too much weight on average salaries after college, this data can also be useful in making comparisons.

Corsava breaks the often overwhelming question of “what kind of college experience is the right fit for me?” down into an engaging and interactive card game that helps students organize and prioritize the characteristics of a college experience that fits them best.

Inline is an in-browser software tool that provides strategic advice about how to produce your best possible Common App application.  Inline also offers support for supplemental, college-specific essays, including an inside view on how those essays would be evaluated by a college admissions officer.

Nobody gives out more, or better, free college essay writing guidance that the Wow Writing Workshop.  Best of all, the guidance they provide applies to writing for school, for business, and for life.  They gave TuitionFit a link to their book on how to write an effective college essay for FREE.  How cool is that?

College Coaching Network provides college planning and scholarship services to families that need additional help navigating the college planning process.  Our curriculum provides a one-on-one training experience without the costs of hiring a private college admissions adviser.

Here’s another federal government site that helps you compare college costs and financial aid offers to see how they might impact you down the road. In addition, other pages on this site provide great information about managing student debt.

FAFSAssist makes the entire process so easy, from completing initial forms to negotiating a better price. Automate completing all your forms and team up with them to appeal effectively.

If you need someone to go to bat with you when you appeal for a better financial aid award offer, the folks at My College Planning Team are an ideal place to start.  They offer a specific service to help you put together the best possible appeal strategy.  It’s not free, but price is peanuts compared to the amount of additional aid you will likely receive.

In addition to laying out a pathway through the college search journey, one particularly robust feature of SimpliCollege is their extensive set of financial aid appeal letters that provide examples for almost every conceivable situation.

SwiftStudent is a free repository of financial aid appeals / requests letter templates for students. We empowers students to advocate for themselves by ensuring that students submit the correct information, contact details, and supporting documents so that financial aid officers are more able to assist the student in overcoming financial barriers to higher education.

Solutions for Tuition has helped hundreds of families appeal financial aid decisions and negotiate for a better price. No matter your personal financial circumstances, they have successfully helped a family like yours.

Use the resources we’ve listed above and know that you, the student, will be the one who makes your college experience what it will be.

So congratulations.  And get ready for an adventure