Read the financial weather
around a college.
Fieldnote is a source-backed college exploration tool. It publishes what the official data says, and stays silent where the data does not. No composite rating, no closure-risk prediction, no invented numbers.
Built for families who need the maths to be honest before the decision gets emotional — and for counsellors who want a tool they can hand a student without qualifying every screen.
Three tools, one workspace
What Fieldnote does today.
An MVP, deliberately. The three features below are the ones a family actually uses in the week they are choosing between offers. Everything else is on the roadmap, and none of it is faked.
Explore
Source-backed college profiles.
Search a curated bundle of institutions with real Scorecard data: tuition, average net price, four-year graduation, median earnings ten years after entry, median debt at completion, and enrolment trend from 2019.
- Bundle
- Real Scorecard snapshot
- Live search
- Optional, keyed
- Composite rating
- Not published
Plan
A cost planner that respects the maths.
Model cost, grants, loans, work-study, family contribution and repayment terms. Includes a USD → INR stress scenario for international students. Work-study is never counted as up-front funding — because it is not.
- Runs
- Client-side, no login
- Stress test
- FX and cost inflation
- Advice
- This is not advice
Decode
Turn an aid letter into a checklist.
Paste plain text from an aid-offer letter. Fieldnote parses it into a categorised checklist — cost, grants, loans, work-study — and computes the actual up-front gap the family has to fund.
- Input
- Plain text (PDF next)
- Method
- Rule-based, editable
- Storage
- Nothing is saved
Why this exists
Every other tool invents a number.
College comparison sites publish grades, scores, safety ratings and closure-risk predictions that no reviewed methodology supports. Families make life-shaping financial decisions on the back of that fiction.
Fieldnote refuses. Every field on a college profile is a real, published Scorecard value. Missing values are shown as “not reported” rather than filled in. There is no composite grade, because we do not have the reviewed sources that would justify one yet.
That is the entire wedge: a tool a counsellor can hand a family without having to qualify half the screen.
Evidence before optimism
A blank field is more useful than a plausible-looking guess. Anywhere the data is thin, Fieldnote says so and moves on.
The maths, honestly
Work-study is earned money, not up-front funding. Loans are borrowed money, not aid. Both survive being called what they are.
Nothing sold, nothing stored
No lead capture on the planner or decoder. No affiliate links. The waitlist collects an email and explicit consent, and stores nothing else.
Under AlphaScrum Academy
Same intellectual standard as the rest of the Academy: publish what the evidence supports, and mark the rest as pending.
Roadmap
What is next, in order.
Public, so we can be held to it. Nothing here is a promise; it is a queue.
PDF aid letters
Pure-Python PDF text extraction so a family can drop the letter in as-is.
Wider snapshot
Expand the bundle to a few hundred institutions covering every US region.
Balance-sheet dimension
Ingest IPEDS Finance to unlock one more of the eight health dimensions.
Counsellor mode
Shared shortlists that survive between sessions, without accounts or logins.
Open the tool, or write to us first.
Fieldnote runs in your browser. There is no account, no download, nothing to install. If you are a counsellor or a school and want to talk about how a partnership could look, sage@worldtradefactory.com reaches someone who reads.