Personalized and Guided College Prep for your teenager, starting from $5.99 a week. Cancel anytime.
Refer friends, start your first week free“If you can get 1% better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better.”
— James Clear, Atomic HabitsCollege prep guidance is scarce, expensive, and unevenly distributed. Here's what the research says.
Private admissions consultants charge $150–$500 an hour. Catalystier starts at $5.99 a week.
ReferenceNational student-to-school-counselor ratio, often as high as 570 students per counselor in underfunded districts.
ReferenceHours of dedicated college-prep advice the average student gets per year. That is not enough!
ReferenceOf high school seniors never finish the FAFSA, leaving $4.4 billion in Pell Grants unclaimed.
ReferenceHours families spend researching college prep alone between grades 8 and 12, roughly 2–3 hours a week.
Eight questions to find the most likely direction (for any grade, not just 8th). Skip it if you already know.
Find your starting point →Pre-med, engineering, policy, finance or business. Add your grade and district.
Three specific tasks with a clear finish line. Nothing else is visible.
Seven days after the last one, on schedule. Unfinished tasks carry forward to your tracker; completion never holds up the plan.
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
— attributed to Mark TwainEight questions, about two minutes. It asks what you already do, not what you think you should say.
This is a starting direction, not a decision. Grades 8 and 9 look nearly identical across all five tracks; the coursework only really diverges in grade 10, so switching before then costs almost nothing. You can change it any time.
Start with this trackPersonalized to your teenager's track, so every week builds real skill on the path they're aiming for, not just grades. Coursework runs alongside real projects, activities and volunteering, building an actual portfolio to point to in essays and applications, not something assembled the summer before deadlines.
Every week is scored the moment it closes, so a slip shows up while it's one bad week, not after it's a semester of them. A downloadable timeline of activities and passion projects, generated automatically from what's actually been completed and ready to turn into real stories for college applications.
Real internship and shadowing programs matched to grade, track and state, sorted by application deadline. Location, stipend, and the three highest-impact picks for college admissions, flagged automatically.
Generated fresh for the exact topic and grade level, never pulled from a bank a student could memorize. A weak topic becomes a targeted set automatically, no request needed. Any set downloads as a branded, printable PDF with an answer key.
Section by section — Reading and Writing and Math for the SAT; English, Math, Reading and Science for the ACT — questions pitched at real exam difficulty and format. Every one comes back with an explanation of the reasoning, not just the right answer, so a miss becomes an actual lesson.
Five real programs for their state and track, with the three highest-impact for college admissions ranked and flagged, each counting down to its next deadline. Pull any of them straight into Practice for a question set styled after its real difficulty and format.
Not a list to sift through: exactly what a student can enter right now, with sponsor, eligibility, award amount and application window attached to each one.
From grade 11. Notes and questions that sharpen a student's own draft, never a rewrite, so the essay a college reads is the one the student actually wrote.
Eight questions grounded in what a student actually gravitates toward, not what they think they should say, surface the most likely direction. Easiest to switch before grade 10, but never locked in.
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
— Benjamin FranklinEverything above, tailored to grades 8 and 9.
Downloadable activity & passion project timeline
Start for grades 8–9Everything above, tailored to grades 10 through 12.
Downloadable activity & passion project timeline
Start for grades 10–12Because you'd read it once and close it. You always see the semester's week themes, so you know where it's going; you just work one week at a time.
It holds your student's grade, track, district and everything they've finished, and uses that to decide what the next week should be. The difference is the sequence and the follow-through.
No, and it won't if you ask. It gives structural feedback and questions your teenager answers themselves. That's a deliberate limit, not a missing feature.
It's the right time. Eighth grade is when math track and language sequencing get decided, and those choices quietly determine what's possible in eleventh.
Because they don't need them yet. SAT and ACT practice appears in grade 10, and essay help in grade 11, when they're actually useful. Grades 8 and 9 focus on course sequencing, projects and building a record worth writing about later. Nothing is hidden behind a higher price; the plan simply grows with the student.
Add as many as you need: $5.99/week for grades 8–9, $7.99/week for grades 10–12, all under your one parent account.
Yes. Refer friends to Catalystier from your account, and your first week's subscription is $0.
Every student gets an 8-digit account ID. Plans, questions and feedback are generated from an ID, a grade, a track and a district. Essays are read once and never stored.