Editorial Standards

Who writes this site

One person, named on every page: Billy Reiner, editor. Compiles every tuition figure on instatecheck.com from the named institution's own published rate page, checks each eligibility rule against the regional compact commission (WICHE, MHEC, SREB, NEBHE) or the state residency statute it cites, and dates every page. Corrections go to [email protected].

There is no collective byline here and no invented contributor. A masthead that names a team which does not meet, and credentials nobody holds, is the standard way a reference site manufactures authority it has not earned. The alternative is narrower and duller: one name, one inbox, and a date on every claim.

Every page displays the date it was last verified, and that date is generated from the underlying data record rather than typed by hand — it cannot drift away from the fact it describes.

Sourcing rules

• Eligibility rules come from the body that administers them: the compact commission, or the state's higher-education authority. Never from another aggregator.
• Rates come from the institution's own published rate page, and that page is linked.
• Every data row carries at least one source and an access date. A row without both fails the build.
• Where a fact cannot be verified, it is published as null and rendered as "not published". It is never estimated to fill a gap.

What we will not write

• That you qualify for anything. Classification and awards are decided by institutions; this site describes rules and links sources.
• A number we cannot point at. If the figure is not published, the page says so.
• An agreement in a direction it does not run. Where a benefit flows one way, the data records that and the reverse page says no route exists.
• Anything that reads as financial or legal advice.

How prose is produced

The explanatory text on state and pair pages is generated from the validated dataset rather than written per page. That is a deliberate accuracy decision: with 7650 pair pages, hand writing guarantees drift between the page and the data behind it. Generation means a correction to one field updates every affected page in the same build, and means the interactive checker and the static pages cannot disagree.

Sentence construction is varied across the grid so the pages are readable rather than identical, but the facts in every construction come from the same fields. No sentence asserts anything the dataset does not contain.

Corrections

Send the page URL and the source that contradicts it to [email protected]. Corrections are verified against the primary source, applied to the dataset, and the affected pages are rebuilt and re-dated. A correction that changes an answer is applied to every page derived from that field, not just the page that was reported.

Independence and money

In-State Check is owned and operated by ConnectEra LLC and is independent of every compact commission, state agency and institution named on it. No institution pays for placement, and rates are not adjusted for any commercial reason. Where the site carries advertising, it is clearly distinguishable from editorial content and has no influence on what is published.

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