College Tool

College Tool is designed to help military and veteran families meticulously plan their college education around their earned benefits, including the GI Bill®, DEA, Fry Scholarship, and Yellow Ribbon programs. This application allows users to stack these benefits across different phases of their education, such as stateside, overseas, and branch-campus studies, providing a clear understanding of the financial implications at each stage.

• Target Audience: Ideal for veterans, active-duty service members, military spouses, dependents using Chapter 35 DEA or Fry Scholarship, children of veterans, and ROTC families.
• Key Features:
• Search over 8,000 VA-approved colleges (Premium feature).
• Phase-based planning for stateside, overseas, and branch campuses.
• Accurate calculation of Monthly Housing Allowance (MHA) / Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH) based on location.
• Eligibility flagging for the Yellow Ribbon program.
• Modeling for Fry Scholarship and Chapter 35 DEA cash stipends.
• Pace comparison for different credit loads per semester (9, 12, 15, 18 credits).
• Reconciliation of tuition, scholarships, and out-of-pocket expenses.
• Access to the Founders Mentorship Program for Fry Scholarship recipients.
• Multi-phase visualization to plan sequential educational periods.
• Privacy Focused: The app is designed with privacy in mind, ensuring that no entered data is saved, no accounts are required, and no analytics are tied to the user. All data is stored locally and is deleted when the app is closed. Users can generate a worksheet to save their plan.
• Premium Subscription: Offers enhanced features such as access to all college searches, multi-phase planning, overseas and branch campus tuition modeling, and PDF worksheet generation for $17.99/year.

College Tool is an independent planning aid and is not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs or the Department of Defense.