v0.2.04
September 7, 2026Two new free tools: the full 2027 AP exam calendar with a clash checker, and every historically Black college in one place.
The 2027 AP exam calendar, with a clash checker
- Every 2027 AP exam date and start time in one place. Exams run 3 to 7 May and 10 to 14 May, with late testing 17 to 21 May. All 39 subjects across both weeks, taken from College Board and dated so you can see when we last checked it.
- Find a scheduling clash months before it becomes a problem. Tick the exams your student is sitting and Solyo flags any two booked into the same session, then names the exact late-testing date each one would move to. College Board publishes the regular and late-testing calendars on separate pages and never crosses them, so families have always had to work this out by eye in April. Your list stays in your own browser.
- It tells you what to do next. A clash is normal, not a mistake to appeal. The page explains that your school AP coordinator orders the alternate exam, that a family cannot arrange it directly, and that it has to happen before the exam ordering deadline.
All 102 historically Black colleges, comparable side by side
- Every HBCU in one directory, grouped by state. All 102, across 19 states, Washington DC and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with admission rate, net price after aid, six-year graduation rate and what graduates earn ten years on.
- Net price, not sticker price. The split is 51 public and 51 private nonprofit, and published tuition tells you very little about which is cheaper for your family. The directory leads with what a typical student actually pays.
- Honest about the count. You will see 99, 102 and 105 quoted in different places. The page shows all three figures and explains that the gap is the year of the count and schools closing or merging, not a disagreement about what an HBCU is.
Testing policy guidance brought current
- Yale no longer belongs in the test-flexible group. It was the canonical example from February 2024 but reverted to requiring the SAT or ACT in May 2026, effective with the 2026-2027 cycle. The guidance said otherwise.
- Ivy League testing policies re-verified against each school own admissions page, rather than against a summary of them.
Easier to find, easier to move around
- School pages no longer lose their own headline in search results. 157 of the 383 college pages were cutting their title mid-figure, so a page about MIT admissions showed a percentage with the word "Acceptance" missing entirely. Every one now keeps the number and the label.
- Related links across the site actually vary. Career, task and FAQ pages were each pointing at the same handful of siblings no matter which page you were on, which left most of them reachable only from their index. Every page now links to a different set, so browsing from one career or one checklist item leads somewhere new.
- A few dead links fixed. Five links to school financial aid sites were built without their address prefix and led nowhere.
v0.1.96
August 31, 2026Ask the counselor which colleges are strongest for a career and get a real answer, plus a quieter inbox and calendar dates that hold up.
Best colleges for a career, finally answered
- "What are the best schools for finance?" now returns a ranked list. Ask about a field, a major, or a career and Solyo ranks the whole college directory by how strongly each school delivers it, with public or private, admit rate, and what graduates of that program actually earn. Ask for public and private together and you get both lists.
- Career words work, not just major names. Investment banking, private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, consulting, pre-med and pre-law all resolve to the right programs instead of coming back empty.
- Solyo's in-depth briefs on 40+ major universities are reachable at last. A retrieval gap kept them hidden, so questions like "is Boston College Jesuit" or "what is Stern known for" fell through. They now answer from the brief: strongest programs, career pipelines and placement, campus life, admissions context.
- Answers show where the numbers came from. A sources panel now names the College Scorecard, federal campus safety data, Solyo's counseling knowledge base, or the scholarship catalog whenever the answer leaned on one.
New expert guidance in the counselor
- Career pathways and school strategy. A new chapter on where school choice genuinely gates career access and where it does not, covering finance, consulting, tech, quant, pre-med, pre-law, and engineering, including how campus recruiting pipelines actually work once your student is enrolled.
- Waitlists and deferrals. What a waitlist offer is really worth, how to write a letter of continued interest, the UC opt-in, the early-round deferral playbook, and how aid and housing work for late admits.
- Choosing a major, and what it costs or earns. Major versus prestige, the computer-science enrollment shift, earnings and underemployment data, direct-admit versus undeclared, double majors, and how to have the conversation at home.
- A corrected FAFSA calendar. Solyo had been repeating a pre-launch projection that the 2026-27 FAFSA opened December 1, 2025. It actually opened September 24, 2025, a week ahead of schedule. The 2027-28 form opens on or before October 1, 2026.
- A fuller guide to Solyo itself. Ask the counselor why PowerSchool and Canvas show different grades, how GPA tracking works, how to share access with your student, or how to reconnect Google, and it now answers from the product guide.
A quieter, more honest inbox
- Recruitment blasts stop pretending to be personal. A college campaign that greets your student by name but carries a mass-mail unsubscribe footer is now recognized as marketing, so it no longer shows up as a personal email that needs a reply.
- Real people are untouched. A counselor writing to you one to one, and your own school's newsletters, keep their place. Only campaign infrastructure gets demoted.
- Draft replies stay grounded. Suggested replies no longer invent commitments on your behalf. If an email asks you to register and nothing in your account says you did, the draft stays non-committal or leaves you a placeholder instead of writing "we're already signed up".
Calendar dates you can trust
- An email read days late no longer lands on the wrong day. "Practice today" now means the day the email arrived, not the day Solyo got around to it, so a backlog after a sync outage no longer scatters events across the wrong dates.
- One event, not two, when two sources describe it. A team app reminder titled by team name and the school's email titled by venue, at the same time on the same day, are now recognized as the same practice.
v0.1.95
August 30, 2026A mailbox that stopped syncing now says so, with a button to fix it.
Reconnect a stalled mailbox
- "Sync stopped" with a Reconnect button. When Google expires a connection, the Email Accounts card now shows the affected mailbox in orange with a Reconnect button that restores it in one pass and backfills the last 7 days. Previously a dead mailbox kept showing a green connected chip with no way back.
v0.1.94
August 30, 2026A compare view that actually helps you decide, 26 more Florida scholarships, and email sync that keeps its own schedule.
Compare schools side by side
- A compare view that finishes the job. Put up to four schools side by side and see the rows that matter first: your student's resolved cost, their match tier, and the four-year total. Rows where the schools are effectively the same collapse into one "Similar" line so the real differences stand out.
- Drop a school without starting over. Dismiss any column to narrow the field, and your comparison survives a page reload.
A clearer saved-school list
- Safety, Target, and Reach at a glance. The saved list is grouped by category with drag-and-drop between groups, so you can see whether the list is balanced.
- Add straight to compare. Save a school and send it to the comparison in the same motion, from search results or from a school page.
- Visitors get an explanation, not a dead end. Someone browsing without an account now sees what the saved list does and how to start one, instead of an empty panel.
Florida scholarships
- 26 more Florida awards. Florida state programs, statewide foundations, and Orlando-area awards are now in the catalog and matched like every other scholarship, with the same researched odds and eligibility detail.
Reliability
- Email sync keeps its own schedule. The background sync now arms itself when the service starts, so your inbox keeps being checked without anyone opening the app.
- Solyo notices when Google drops a connection. Expired mailbox connections are now detected and flagged the moment they fail, which is what makes the Reconnect button in 0.1.95 possible.
v0.1.93
August 30, 2026Your student can now have their own Solyo login, and grades always land in the right grading period.
Invite your student
- Your student gets their own login. From Settings, invite your student by email and they get their own Solyo account: College Search, College Planning, Scholarships, Career Exploration, their grades, and the AI Counselor, all scoped to them.
- They can pitch in on their own profile. Students can log their own test scores and add their extracurricular activities, so the scholarship and admissions picture stays up to date without you doing the typing.
- You stay in control. Your emails, family calendar, and financial details are never visible to a student account, grades are read-only for them, and you can revoke or restore access anytime from Manage Students.
Grades in the right grading period
- The school calendar now decides the grading period. New grades are filed under the semester or trimester the calendar says your student is in, so a grade received in August no longer shows up under last spring.
- The dashboard and the School Grades page finally agree. Both now resolve the current year and period the same way, so you see the same grades wherever you look.
- Smarter reading of Canvas emails. Solyo now understands the course and term codes in Canvas notifications, including summer-session courses, and uses them to file each grade correctly.
A clearer scholarship tile
- One tile per student on the dashboard. Each student now gets their own Scholarships tile showing one number that matters: how many awards they are eligible to enter this year, plus a red alert with the exact date when an application closes within the week.
- Counts that match. The "For you" tab count now matches the list of scholarships on the page.
v0.1.92
August 27, 2026The right grade level for every student, and a counselor that recognizes more school names.
Accuracy fixes
- Grade levels stay correct. A student's grade level is now derived from their grade progression, so it rolls over correctly after summer and can no longer drift out of date. Existing records repair themselves automatically.
- The counselor recognizes more school names. Names with punctuation like "St. John's" and common abbreviations now resolve to the right college in chat instead of coming back empty.
v0.1.91
August 26, 2026Fewer duplicate calendar events.
Calendar fixes
- Fewer duplicates. A follow-up to the calendar cleanup in 0.1.90: the same school event arriving in slightly different emails is now recognized as one event more reliably, so your calendar stays clean.
v0.1.90
August 26, 2026Scholarship odds you can actually trust, one clear view per award, a plan anchored to your student's real year, and cleaner email processing.
Honest scholarship odds
- Published win rates, when they exist. Where a provider publishes real numbers, Solyo now shows the actual rate, like "about 1 in 39, published rate", instead of an estimate. We researched every award in the catalog to find them.
- A realistic dollar figure. The headline now says what applying broadly is realistically worth for your student, weighted by the odds of each award, instead of adding up every maximum prize.
- Every award says what kind it is. Badges distinguish "Guaranteed if you file" state programs, "Capped: file early" first-come funds, and true competitions, so you know whether an award is paperwork or a contest.
- No made-up numbers. When a provider publishes nothing, Solyo says so plainly rather than inventing a figure.
One clear view per award
- A single Learn More drawer. Every scholarship now opens one complete view: eligibility check with your student's answers filled in (tap any row to edit), what you'll get, how winners are chosen, key dates, what you'll need, and the application link.
- Richer backgrounds. Every award's About section now opens with who runs it, why it exists, and what the selection committee values, researched from the provider's own pages.
- Browse with detail. Cards in Browse All open a detail sheet with About, Eligibility, Key Dates, and How to Apply, even for awards outside your student's matches.
A plan for your student's actual year
- Freshmen through juniors see their own year, not senior year. The page now leads with "This year, 11th grade", the awards your student can actually enter now, and a month-by-month calendar of this school year.
- Senior year is a preview, not a to-do list. Awards that only open senior year appear in one "Senior year ahead" card with a realistic total and prep milestones, so nothing pressures you before it should.
- Answer questions right where they block. The questions that unlock more awards now appear inline, ranked by how many awards each answer unlocks.
Simpler settings
- One "Financial Aid & Scholarships" page. The two overlapping settings sections are merged into one, with the Pell Grant estimate built in.
- Criteria and Essays at hand. Two buttons on the Scholarships page open your student's full criteria list and the essay workspace directly.
Cleaner email processing
- Fewer duplicate calendar events and better email summaries. A batch of improvements to how school emails are classified, summarized, and turned into calendar events.
v0.1.89
July 25, 2026Scholarships come to Solyo: personalized matches with honest eligibility, essay and recommendation help, a full application tracker, and a public directory.
Meet Scholarships
- Personalized matches from a vetted catalog. The new Scholarships page matches your student against 180+ hand-verified college scholarships: national awards, all 50 states' grant programs, and need-, merit-, and identity-based funds.
- Unanswered questions never disqualify. Solyo is honest about what it knows: an award is "Eligible" only when every checkable requirement passes, and otherwise shows "N answers away" with quick inline questions you can answer in seconds to confirm more awards.
- Real dates, not vague ones. Every award shows when applications open, the deadline with a countdown, and a full key-dates timeline for the cycle.
From match to submitted
- A built-in application tracker. Track each application from saved to submitted to won. Tracking an award automatically creates a step-by-step task chain with reminders: request recommendations, draft the essay, order the transcript, submit, plus a FAFSA step for need-based awards.
- Add your own. Found a local award at school or church? Add it as a custom scholarship and track it alongside everything else.
- Merit aid from the colleges themselves. A new section shows average merit awards and aid rates at the schools on your student's list, because institutional aid is often bigger than any private scholarship.
Essay and recommendation help
- Write once, apply many times. Essays are grouped by theme so you can see that one strong essay covers a dozen awards. Drafts autosave, and you can mark which awards each essay is used for.
- Feedback and a head start. Get AI feedback on a draft, or send it to the AI Counselor to keep working on it in chat.
- Recommendation letters made easy. A recommender kit builds a ready-to-send request email and a "brag sheet" about your student to give teachers everything they need.
- An application kit per award. Each award gets a checklist plus a copy-paste dossier of your student's details for filling out provider forms.
Solyo keeps watch
- A weekly scan works for you. Solyo checks every match weekly and nudges you about deadlines within two weeks and awards worth applying to now.
- A GPA guard for renewals. Because Solyo sees grades, it can warn you when a GPA is getting close to the floor an award requires to renew, before the money is at risk.
- Juniors get a roadmap. Students not yet in senior year see what they can do now and what those moves unlock for senior year.
A public scholarship directory
- Browse without an account. A new public directory covers every award in the catalog, with hub pages for all 50 states plus DC, deadlines by month, and award types, each with eligibility, key dates, and how to apply.
- Ask the counselor. The AI Counselor now knows every award in depth: ask "how do I win the Coca-Cola Scholars scholarship" and get real guidance on what the judges value.
v0.1.88
July 2, 2026A completely redesigned homepage: calmer, faster, easier to read, and much clearer about what Solyo does with your school emails.
A new home for Solyo
- Redesigned from top to bottom. A new display typeface, one consistent brand orange, larger and more readable text on every device, and a live product preview that comes to life as you scroll.
- Built for readability. Type sizes, contrast, and touch targets are tuned for busy parents reading on a phone — and the whole page respects reduced-motion settings.
Clearer feature names, and a new one
- Email to Tasks. Permission slips, picture day forms, SAT registrations: the to-dos buried in school emails now have their own showcase, sorted into School, College Admission, and Family — with every task showing the email it came from.
- Email to Calendar and Admission Insights. Features are now named for what they actually do, so a first-time visitor understands Solyo in one scroll.
v0.1.87
June 22, 2026Campus safety on every school, a much deeper look at cost, debt, class size and outcomes, and a counselor that knows it all.
Campus safety on every school page
- See how safe a campus is, in real numbers. Each school now shows official Campus Safety (Clery Act) data — violent crime, sexual assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, hate crimes, and total criminal offenses — for the latest reported year.
- Counts and rates, so size doesn’t mislead. Every figure is shown both as a raw count and as a rate per 1,000 students, alongside a 3-year trend, so a large university and a small college can be compared fairly.
- Ask the counselor directly. You can now ask Solyo "is this school safe?" or "how does the crime rate at X compare to Y?" and get the actual Clery numbers in the answer — for any school, or for your whole saved list at once.
A much deeper look at cost, aid and debt
- Financial aid detail beyond the sticker price. School pages now show the average percent of financial need met, the share of students whose need is fully met, average merit awards for students without financial need, average need-based scholarships, and the percent of graduates who leave with loans.
- A fuller debt and repayment picture. Median debt is now joined by the full range (10th to 90th percentile), the monthly payment, the loan repayment rate, and the loan default rate.
- A one-click Net Price Calculator. Where a school publishes one, a "Net Price Calculator" button now sits right on the Cost & Financial Aid card so you can estimate your real cost in a couple of clicks.
More to know about every school
- Class size, finally. New Class Size and Campus Life sections show the percent of classes under 20, under 30, and 100+, plus how many students live on campus, the out-of-state share, and Greek-life participation.
- Clearer graduation and outcomes. Graduation now splits into 4-year and 6-year rates, with retention, transfer-out rate, earnings at 6, 8 and 10 years, and the share of graduates out-earning a typical high-school graduate.
- Richer school profile. Pages now also show campus setting (urban, suburban, town, rural), religious affiliation, a fuller student-demographics breakdown, transfer-admission details, and high-school course requirements — with empty fields automatically hidden so each page stays clean.
- Accurate "most popular majors." The graduates-per-major figures behind a school’s top fields of study now use the most reliable source, so program sizes and rankings are correct.
A smarter AI Counselor
- It now knows graduates per major. Ask "how many people graduate in Computer Science at UCLA?" or "what are the biggest majors at this school?" and the counselor answers from official data, with median earnings five years out.
- It draws on the new affordability and campus-life data too. Questions about percent of need met, merit aid, classes under 20, on-campus housing, and Greek life now have real answers in chat.
Richer college guides
- The per-school college guides now include a campus safety section ("Is this school safe?") and a popular-majors breakdown, written for parents and built so search engines and AI assistants can answer questions about each school directly.
v0.1.86
June 13, 2026More accurate, up-to-date college admissions data, and a fixed "Find Colleges Near Me."
More accurate admissions data
- Top schools now show their latest Common Data Set. We refreshed the official admissions data — acceptance rate, test scores, GPA profile, and what each school values in an application — to the 2025–2026 cycle for many of the most-searched colleges, including Yale, Stanford, UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, Dartmouth, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Emory, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, and Bowdoin.
- Schools that previously showed no admissions detail now do. Several well-known liberal arts colleges — Kenyon, Lafayette, Occidental, Sarah Lawrence, Bates, Smith, Harvey Mudd, and others — were missing their admissions profile entirely. They now display a full Common Data Set.
- Acceptance and yield rates display correctly everywhere. We fixed a data issue that could make some top schools’ acceptance rates and the selectivity meter read incorrectly. Every school now shows the right number.
- What each school values is shown for more colleges. The "What Matters in Admissions" breakdown — rigor of coursework, GPA, essays, test scores, and more — is now populated for the refreshed schools.
"Find Colleges Near Me" works again
- The Find Colleges Near Me button is fixed. It was returning almost no results and, on some browsers, was blocked entirely. Nearby search now reliably finds colleges around your location.
v0.1.85
June 12, 2026Solyo Chat experience layer, voice parity, chat history, smarter college search, and a redesigned calendar tile.
A smarter, more capable AI Counselor
- Solyo Chat now answers from your own data and acts on it. The assistant reasons across your calendar, emails, tasks, grades, school list, and college/career knowledge in one conversation — and can make changes for you (add or complete tasks, edit your profile, merge contacts) with a quick confirmation, plus an Undo for the last action.
- Rich answer cards. Where it used to reply in plain text, the chat now shows clean visual cards — your school list by tier, side-by-side college comparisons, calendar events, deadline checklists, admission-chance bars, and grade summaries.
- It speaks first when something matters. The welcome screen surfaces proactive suggestions (an upcoming deadline, a new grade, a task worth doing). Delivery stays in-product — a notification bell plus optional web push — never extra email.
- Long-term memory. The counselor remembers useful context about your family across sessions, and you can ask it to forget anything.
Voice that matches the chat
- Talking to Solyo now uses the same brain as typing: voice conversations are saved to your history, carry the same answer cards and follow-up suggestions, confirm low-risk actions out loud, and let you continue a voice conversation in chat without losing the thread.
Chat history
- A new history drawer (mobile-first, right side) lets you browse, search, rename, and delete past conversations. Each one gets an auto-generated title and preview.
Better college search by major
- Searching for a major now also surfaces schools that are strong in that field overall — not just ones with an exact program-code match — so strong fits (including majors offered only at the graduate level) stop falling through the cracks.
- The Programs tab now has degree-level filters (certificate, associate, bachelor’s, master’s, and more) that line up with your search, so you can focus on the credential you actually care about.
Calendar improvements
- Calendar event answers now show only the event you asked about. Ask "when is my flight to SFO?" and you get that one flight as a card — not a wall of unrelated events.
- Tap a calendar card to jump straight to it in your calendar, with that day selected and the event opened.
- The chat calendar card now matches the dashboard’s event styling (colored date pill, clean layout) for a consistent look.
- Fixes to Calendar and GPA / School Settings behavior.
More complete school data
- Expanded Common Data Set coverage: high-school unit requirements, transfer-admission details, and student-life sections now feed the counselor’s answers.