Fair Opportunity Project

One of the biggest lifts during the college application process is writing and refining personal or scholarship essays. Essays are a chance for students to speak directly to the specific college or organization. The influence of the essay can weigh heavily on the student. Our AI Essay Reviewer and Expert Essay Review help relieve some of that stress.

Fair Opportunity Project has created an AI Essay Reviewer to help students succeed in creating articulate and unique essays. This tool provides instant feedback on grammar and the flow of students’ essays. The model is trained on our decade-long experience of personally editing students' essays and helping students get into top colleges across the country, like Harvard, Cornell, and MIT. For more in-depth feedback, Expert Essay Review provides feedback from professionals. Our reviewers can advise on tone, form, efficacy, and more.

Your financial support helps us consult with admissions departments on how to ensure our model is up to date with developments of personal and scholarship essays.

The cost of college is the most important factor for a student when deciding about college, yet far too many students leave financial aid unclaimed because the process seems confusing and complicated. School counselors have too many students in their caseload. For the 2024-25 FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid), just 54.4% of the nation's high school seniors completed the form. Completing the FAFSA is the most important step in accessing an average of over $15,000 in federal, state, institutional and scholarship aid.

That's why we offer this free service to underserved high school students nationwide. Anyone can log into our website and access a range of services. We offer a FAFSA chatbot, trained exclusively on the most current Federal Student Aid documentation. The chatbot can communicate in multiple languages.

Second, we offer virtual group FAFSA help sessions in the evenings, where students and parents can get personalized help from financial aid professionals on how to complete their FAFSA.

Third, we offer 1:1 virtual help sessions during the weekday, evening and weekends.

When you support this project, you are empowering critical help that is not otherwise available for first generation and low-income students. Here's what your support pays for:

1. Ongoing outreach to students and schools about our free services

2. Recruiting and training volunteers

3. Scheduling, meeting and notetaking software

4. Updating and maintaining our FAFSA Chatbot

5. Incentives for volunteers and students to participate.

Applying for financial aid can be complicated, and it's even harder when you don't know where to get answers. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is the most important step for students in getting money for college.

Fair Opp helps students navigate the financial aid process and our team engineered this chatbot to answer the questions that we get asked over and over again:

How do you know whether a parent needs to provide their information on a student's FAFSA application? What you're supposed to do with an SAR? How about what happens after you file a FAFSA? How to explain the process to a Spanish-speaking parent? ¿Puedes explicar el proceso de FAFSA en español? How to explain the FAFSA process in Chinese, Arabic, Punjabi or dozens of other languages?

These are some of the barriers that students face when trying to complete the FAFSA. School counselors have very limited time to help students with their FAFSAs and college planning. The average school has a 424:1 student-to-counselor ratio. With our FAFSA chatbot, students and counselor can find the answer to a financial aid question instantly, saving precious time and avoiding delays that may mean a student never completes the form.

You can test out the chatbot now on our website: https://www.fairopportunityproject.org/fafsa-chat

Your financial support of this project will help us pay for the following:

1. Monthly hosting of the AI tool

2. Periodic updates to the knowledge base from Federal Student Aid

3. Outreach to schools and students about the tool

4. Upgrades to the chatbot with additional financial aid information as requested by students and schools. (e.g., contact information for college financial aid offices.)

The college application and financial aid process often feels like an insurmountable maze. Public school counselors tackle these challenges as best they can, but there are on average 424 students for every public school counselor. Specific populations are impacted the most, such as students from low-income, first-generation, or rural backgrounds.

Here is where Fair Opp’s award-winning guide to college applications and financial aid steps in. We continuously update The Guide with the most recent and relevant information for students and counselors to reference at any point. The Guide has been translated into 7 languages and distributed to every public high school in the U.S.

What does your donation do? It helps us keep The Guide updated and available to thousands of high schools across the country for absolutely no cost.