What you are buying, and what we owe you.

The agreement is between The Scholar’s Bureau and the paying adult. You sign it, not your student. Your student is who the work is for, and they are not a party to it. Where our users are minors we treat the parent as the person with authority over the account and the person we are accountable to.

Your counselor is an independent contractor engaged by The Scholar’s Bureau, not an employee of The Scholar’s Bureau. You are contracting with The Scholar’s Bureau, and The Scholar’s Bureau pays the counselor.

You buy a package: a fixed scope for a fixed price, over a fixed term. The scope is the number of applications covered, how the essay allowance is counted, how many pieces of writing we will read in a week, the response times, and the start and end dates.

The price is snapshotted when you enroll. Not looked up later. When you enroll, the price you were quoted is written onto your enrollment as its own value, and nothing in our software can derive it from a catalogue that might have changed. If we raise our prices next month, your enrollment does not know about it.

Nothing renews. There is no recurring charge, no subscription and no auto-renewal anywhere in this product. Not disabled, not present. If you want another cycle, you buy one.

There is no platform fee, materials fee or hourly rate. One number. Add-ons after the engagement ends (waitlist letters, aid appeals, choosing between offers) are priced and agreed before you say yes, never added at checkout.

Payments today are recorded by a person rather than taken by a payment processor. Our system records where each payment came from, and “recorded manually” is a real value in it rather than a claim about an integration we have not built.

You get three business days from enrollment to cancel in writing, and work does not start inside them. This is enforced by our software, not just promised: your enrollment carries the date the window closes, computed at checkout, and the database refuses to record session work or assign your student homework before it does.

To be precise about what that gate covers, since work not starting does not mean nothing happens:

Refused inside the window: any written session record from your counselor, and any task assigned to your student. Those are the two things that constitute delivered service in our system, and a counselor cannot create either one, not by hand and not through the automated summary path.

Not refused inside the window: messages. Your family can write to us and our agent replies, and if your student says something that indicates they are in danger the crisis path works on day two exactly as it works on day forty. We are not going to gate a safety path on a billing window. Our crisis protocol describes what that path does and does not do.

If you cancel inside the window, you are entitled to a full refund and we have performed no service to charge you for. That is the point of not starting.

No guarantee of admission or financial aid, to any institution, ever. The Scholar’s Bureau is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any college or university named anywhere on this site.

We do not write any part of your student’s application. That applies to the counselor and to the AI equally, and the AI refuses it as a code branch rather than as an instruction we hope it follows.

We will not tell you your student’s chances. The AI refuses chance questions and hands them to your counselor. It has no college data loaded and says so rather than answering from memory.

Our response times are a commitment by people, and nothing measures them. The agreement states them: essay reviews and written questions, within business hours. We want to be honest about their status: there is no timer, no overdue list and no alarm anywhere in this software, and no timestamp from which a missed deadline could be computed. If we are late, you will notice before we do. We would rather tell you that than let you assume there is a system watching.

This is not an on-demand service. Business hours are Monday to Friday. Nothing is monitored overnight or at weekends.

We decline late senior enrollments, after November 1, because the deadlines the package exists to help with have already passed. This is a practice our staff follow, not a check our software performs. Nothing in the code stops such a sale today.

What we don’t do is the longer version of this section.

You pick a counselor from their own page and that is who you work with. Nobody is substituted quietly.

Before a counselor can be assigned to your student at all, our database requires a completed background check, mandated-reporter training and a signed code of conduct on file for them. This is a constraint in the database rather than a step in a process: an enrollment naming a counselor without all three is refused, including when an administrator attempts it.

If a counselor cannot finish your cycle, we move your student to another counselor on the roster. Everything written down so far moves with them, because the record belongs to your student rather than to the counselor. The price does not change. Every such move is recorded with who made it and why, and only an administrator at The Scholar’s Bureau can make one, not the counselor leaving and not the counselor arriving.

If the fit is wrong, say so and we will move you, and your price does not change. It is fixed on your agreement, and a move does not touch it.

An engagement is either current, has an unpaid balance, or has been ended with a balance due. If you fall behind, work pauses and you are told in your account that it has paused. You do not find out by noticing that nothing is happening.

Every one of those transitions is recorded with who made it, when, and a written reason. Our software refuses to record one without a reason, because it is the kind of decision you might reasonably dispute a year later.

Your family’s records stay readable to you through all of it. Written feedback and documents survive an engagement ending.

What we collect, who can read it, how long we keep it and the parts we have not settled are on the privacy page. Two things from it belong here as terms rather than as description: a student needs to be 13 or over to have their own The Scholar’s Bureau login, and messages in a thread are immutable by design, so nobody, including us, can quietly change what was said to your student or by them.