Quick Start — A Personalized College Plan in 6 Questions, 6 Minutes

A 12th-grade beta tester told me she had spent three Saturdays trying to figure out where to start with college. Not where to apply — where to start. What to research, what to save, what to skip, which deadlines were real, whether she should even be looking at four-year schools or community college. Three Saturdays. She had a stack of browser tabs. She had no plan.

I built Quick Start because of that conversation. It's a six-question wizard that takes about six minutes and gives the family a personalized college plan on the other side — matched schools, a safe-bet degree pick if the kid is undecided, projected CLEP savings, and a deadline calendar that turns the next 12 months into a real sequence instead of a fog. It's the front door to College Decoded, and it's free.

This article walks through what Quick Start asks, what it gives back, and how families are using it to skip the three-Saturdays-of-tabs version of college planning.

By the end of this article you will know:

• The 6 questions Quick Start asks — and why these are the right 6 (not 60)
• The 4 outputs the plan generates, with what each one actually says
• How to use the plan output to make a college decision in the next two weeks

The 6 questions — and why these six

Most college tools either ask too much (a 40-question intake that takes an hour and produces a generic report) or too little (a search bar that gives you 6,500 schools with no filter on what your kid can actually afford or get into). Quick Start sits in the middle on purpose.

The six questions are designed to do two things at once: give the algorithm enough signal to match the right schools, and give the family enough self-reflection that the plan output feels personal rather than generic.

Question 1: What grade is your student in? This sets the timeline. A 12th-grader's plan is dominated by FAFSA, deposits, and summer melt — items in the next 60-90 days. A 10th-grader's plan is dominated by PSAT, course rigor, and pre-college credit — items spread across the next two years. Same wizard, completely different output, because the now is different.

Question 2: What state are you in? State unlocks three things: in-state public schools (which are almost always the cheapest path), state-specific grants (Cal Grant, TEXAS Grant, Indiana Frank O'Bannon, etc.), and free community-college programs (Tennessee Promise, Oregon Promise, California Promise — about 30 states have one). The state question alone moves the matched-college list by tens of thousands of dollars in net cost.

Question 3: What career field interests your kid (or "not sure yet")? The honest answer here is "not sure yet" for about half the families. Quick Start treats that as data, not failure — if the kid is undecided, the plan recommends a safe-bet degree (Business, IT, Accounting, Healthcare Admin, Nursing, or Education) chosen for high job openings + recession resistance + maximum optionality if the kid changes their mind in year 2.

Question 4: What's your family's budget per year? Ranges from "we need significant aid" through "$10K-$25K/yr" up to "we can pay full sticker." This drives the affordability filter on matched schools. A family that picks the lowest bracket sees a different school list than one that picks the highest — not better or worse, just fittable to the budget instead of fantasy-shopping.

Question 5: GPA and test score (if known). Provides admit-likelihood signal. Quick Start matches schools across three tiers — safety, target, reach — based on the kid's academic profile so the family sees options at each tier instead of either ten reaches or ten safeties.

Question 6: Any AP, CLEP, dual-enrollment, or work-experience credits already earned? This is the question most college tools don't ask. It unlocks the CLEP savings projection in the plan output — how much college tuition the kid has already taken off the bill, and how much more they could take off with a few summer CLEP exams.

The 4 outputs

When Quick Start finishes, the family gets a one-page personalized college plan with four sections. Each one is designed to be actionable in the next two weeks, not pretty-but-vague.

Output 1: Matched schools (typically 6–10 schools). Real schools in your state and adjacent states, scored across affordability, academic match, and major fit. Each school comes with the estimated net cost (not sticker — net, after typical grants and aid for your family's bracket) and the deal score that compares its net cost to its outcomes. The kid leaves Quick Start with a list of 6–10 schools that are actually worth applying to, not a 6,500-school search bar.

Output 2: Safe-bet degree (if the kid is undecided). If question 3 was answered "not sure yet," the plan picks one of six high-optionality degrees based on the kid's GPA and state job market: Business Administration (universal versatility), Information Technology (19 career paths from one degree), Accounting & Finance (124,000+ openings per year, recession-resistant), Healthcare Administration (aging population), Education (stable local demand, clear licensure), or Nursing — BSN (highest salary, strongest job security). The plan explains why it picked that degree for this kid's specific situation — not as a recommendation to follow blindly, but as a starting point that's better than "decide later."

Output 3: Projected CLEP / pre-college credit savings. Based on the kid's already-earned credits and what the matched schools accept, the plan projects how much tuition the family can save with a few targeted summer CLEP exams. Most plans show $2,000–$8,000 of savings available. This is the moment most families realize there's a credit lever they didn't know existed, and it's why Quick Start funnels into the CLEP Savings Calculator afterward.

Output 4: Deadline calendar (the next 12 months). Personalized to the kid's grade and state. A 12th-grader's calendar in May shows FAFSA verification → final aid letter → enrollment deposit → housing application → summer CLEP exams → fall orientation. A 10th-grader's calendar shows fall PSAT → spring AP exams → summer college visits. The point is to take the abstract "we need to think about college" and turn it into a sequence of dated items the family can put on a real calendar.

How families are using the Quick Start output this week

The plan is most useful when the family treats it as a 14-day action plan, not a 4-year strategic document. Three patterns we see repeatedly:

Pattern 1: The "narrow the list" use. A family with a kid who's "looking at colleges" but has never narrowed past 30+ tabs runs Quick Start, gets 6–10 matched schools, and uses that list as the application target. The next two weeks become: pick 5 of the 10 to seriously research, draft Common App essays for those 5, request transcripts to those 5. The fog clears because the list is finite.

Pattern 2: The "find the credit lever" use. A family whose kid took AP English, AP Calc, and an econ dual-enrollment class but never thought about CLEP runs Quick Start, sees that the matched schools accept CLEP, and the plan shows $4,000–$6,000 of potential summer savings. The next two weeks become: register for 2 CLEP exams in July, study during summer, knock 6–9 credits off the first-year bill.

Pattern 3: The "undecided kid, give us a direction" use. A family with a junior who has good grades but no career direction runs Quick Start with "not sure yet" on the career question, gets a safe-bet degree recommendation with reasoning, and uses that as the starting point for the next 12 months of conversations. The point isn't to lock the kid in; it's to give them a real default that can be revised instead of the paralysis of "I have no idea."

The bottom line

The reason most families spend three Saturdays in browser tabs is that the college research industry is set up to overwhelm them with options, not give them a plan. Search tools, ranking sites, scholarship databases, financial aid calculators — each one does one thing well, but none of them produce a single document the family can act on this week.

Quick Start exists because that gap was the most consistent complaint from beta testers and the most consistent problem I saw in 20 years of education-navigation work before CD. A first plan, generated from minimum input, that the family can refine later — that's the missing first step. Once you have it, every other CD tool (college search, CLEP calculator, financial aid hub, decision matrix) becomes useful because you know what to plug into them.

If you take one thing away: don't research first and decide later. Decide first, even with imperfect information, and let the research refine the decision. Quick Start is the fastest way to get to a decidable starting point. Six questions. Six minutes. Free. Then the real work begins — but at least you're not staring at a browser tab anymore.