Tools for College Students (and the Parents Paying for It)
Empower your college journey and protect your budget with professional digital tools designed for students and parents.
College involves two very different kinds of work: figuring out how to pay for it, and actually writing the papers once you're there. We built tools for both, and they all run in your browser, with 10 trial usages a day on Professional Tools and 2 on Premium Applications such as the Citation Generator, to try them before you decide on a day pass or a monthly plan.
Paying for it
The College Cost Calculator estimates total cost of attendance across multiple years — tuition, room and board, books, and fees — with an annual increase rate and any scholarships netted out. If loans are already in the picture, the Student Loan Calculator shows your standard monthly payment, payoff time, and total interest, and models what paying extra each month actually saves you.
College Cost Calculator Student Loan Repayment Calculator
If you're saving ahead of time instead, the 529 Savings Calculator works backward from a goal amount and a timeline to tell you the monthly contribution you'd actually need.
529 College Savings Calculator
And once grades are in, the GPA Calculator does the actual weighted math across courses and credit hours, rather than a rough mental estimate.
GPA CalculatorHow to Calculate Your GPA Online from Courses & Credits
Writing the papers
The Citation Generator covers APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard styles across websites, books, and journal articles, and builds an alphabetized reference list as you go.
Citation GeneratorThe Paper Format Checker actually reads your .docx file's real margins, font, and line spacing and checks them against APA, MLA, or Chicago requirements — not a guess based on word count, an actual read of the document's formatting.
One honesty note: our Text Similarity Checker compares two texts you provide against each other — it has no connection to the internet or any academic database, so it's useful for comparing your own drafts or checking against a specific source, but it is not a substitute for your school's actual plagiarism-detection tool.
Text Similarity CheckerA worked example: planning one year ahead
Suppose a family is looking at a school with $28,000 a year in tuition, room, and board, plus about $1,500 for books and fees, and expects costs to rise a few percent each year. Put those figures into the College Cost Calculator along with any scholarship, and you get a four-year total to plan around instead of a single first-year number. Take the remaining gap to the Student Loan Calculator and try a few extra-payment amounts, say an additional $50 or $100 a month, to see how payoff time and total interest change. If a younger sibling is still years away, run the 529 Savings Calculator with a goal amount and a timeline to see what monthly contribution that implies.
These are planning estimates. Actual aid, interest rates, and 529 rules vary by school, lender, and state, so treat the results as a starting point and confirm details with the financial aid office. This is not financial advice.
A semester routine that uses all of it
Early in the term, check the cost estimate against your actual bill. Mid-term, update the GPA Calculator with the grades you have so far to see what the rest of the term needs to look like. When a paper is assigned, build citations as you read sources instead of at 2 a.m. the night before, and run the Paper Format Checker on the finished .docx before you submit. Keep the Text Similarity Checker for comparing your own drafts against each other or against a source you already have.
See the full Student toolkit