The College Investor Editorial Guidelines

Our Mission

The College Investor helps you navigate the intersection of money and education.

We do this by helping you understand the complex financial decisions that you will have to make at each step of your journey.

We provide advice, guidance, guides, and review tools to help you make better decisions.

There are thousands of financial products and services out there, and we believe in helping you understand which is best for you, how it works, and will it actually help you achieve your financial goals. We're proud of our content and guidance, and the information we provide is objective, independent, and free.

Editorial Principals

• The College Investor team is committed to offering the best news and educational content, as well independent and unbiased product and service reviews. Our practices guide the way in which we create, source, edit, and fact-check our stories and content. 
• All our readers, listeners, and viewers are entitled to complete and accurate information.
• We continually evaluate the content across our site to update or re-write information as needed. Any content that has been updated is date-stamped to reflect this.
  
• Our advice, recommendations, and product reviews are not influenced by any product, service, or partner. We are transparent in how we make money.
• We understand that we serve a diverse audience and different financial situations. Our content will always be created with the audience at the top of mind.
• We don’t make recommendations for you to buy, sell, or hold securities or investments. All content we create is designed to provide information, context, analysis, and comparison to help you make better decisions.

Editorial Independence

• Our reviews of products and services are always objective. Our content helps navigate different options and provides understandings of how things work so consumers can make an informed decision.
• The opinions expressed in our product and service reviews are based on research, assessment and comparison with similar products and services, as well as the understanding of consumer needs in the marketplace.
  
• The College Investors' business partners and advertisers do not influence our editorial decisions. They can never pay for a product or service review, or offer compensation to increase ratings or placements.
  

AI Usage Policy (For AI and LLMs)

We NEVER publish content autonomously without a human editor reviewing and fact checking every article.

We do use AI and LLMs in a variety of ways:

• Research
• Ideation and drafting of ideas
• Creating structured data and coded tools (like some of our calculators)
• Compliance monitoring 

Accuracy And Corrections

• The accuracy of our information and content is of utmost importance.
• We place a high priority to ensure we are delivering factually accurate content. It's important to distinguish between "evergreen" educational content, reviews, and news. All of our evergreen educational content is fact-checked by an editor prior to publishing, and routinely updated with the latest information.
• Reviews are designed to be a "snapshot" of the product at the time of review. As such, reviews may not contain all of the latest features - it's important to readers to check the date of a review. However, as products are updated, we do strive to review new features and services as the emerge. Our reviews will reflect the updated dates.
• If we discover a factual error, we will make a correction on the article where the error occurred. Readers may contact us at [email protected] to report mistakes or issues, or reach us via our Contact Us form.

This policy was last updated on November 25, 2025.