Built by parents. For families.
CollegeHound is a digital college planning system: a shared family organizer plus personalized guidance for every step.
Why we built CollegeHound
We're Shelley and Ed Psyk. We've been through the college planning process with multiple kids already — and we have another one in it right now. Club sports and recruiting emails, campus visits and NCAA paperwork, scholarship deadlines, essay drafts, brag sheets — and underneath all of it, the question that never gets easier: "Is this school actually a fit?"
Every time, the process looked the same: scattered spreadsheets, text threads, email chains, sticky notes, and a folder of documents nobody could find when it mattered. High stakes, no system.
So we built the one we wish we'd had: a system that keeps families organized and on schedule, and helps answer the three questions every college search comes down to.
What college planning comes down to
Strip away the noise, and a college search is one logistics problem wrapped around three hard questions:
Where do I want to go to college?
Building a list of schools genuinely worth applying to.
Can I get in?
An honest read on where a student actually stands at each one.
Can I afford it?
Knowing the real cost before applying, not after the offer letter.
Together, those three questions are what we mean by fit — and we put a dedicated Fit breakdown on every college's detail page so families can see all three at a glance. The hard part was never any single question; it's answering all three, for every school on the list, while staying organized and on schedule. Most families do it across scattered spreadsheets and email threads. CollegeHound does it in one place.
What CollegeHound is
CollegeHound gives families one shared place to organize the entire college planning process — grades, activities, test scores, essays, college lists, scholarships, deadlines, and next steps.
Scout, your personalized guide, learns your student's profile and helps your family understand what to do next. It's not a generic chatbot — Scout uses AI to read your student's actual grades, test scores, activities, and college list, and turns them into guidance built around that one student. The data Scout sends to an AI model is anonymized first — stripped of anything that identifies your student.
The Binder is free for every family, permanently. CollegeHound Plus adds Scout, scholarship search, deadline tracking, and personalized next steps.
What we believe
Equal access
The Binder is free for every family, every grade, forever. College planning tools shouldn't be limited to families who can afford a private counselor.
Guidance, not replacement
Scout helps families organize and understand the process. It doesn't replace school counselors, teachers, or the student's own work.
Your data is yours
We don't sell student data, and we don't track your family to serve ads. Anything Scout sends to an AI model is anonymized first. Period.
Community first
We launched by giving free CollegeHound Plus to the Class of 2027 at our local high school in Apex, North Carolina — then opened it to the first 500 Launch Pass families across the country. Start close to home, then open the doors wide: that's how we want to grow.
Meet the founders
Shelley Psyk
Co-founder & CEO
Shelley leads CollegeHound's product, design, and educator partnerships. She's a speech-language pathologist with more than 30 years of experience working with students and families, a member of the American School Counselor Association (ASCA), and holds a College Admissions Specialist certification.
She's also a parent who has lived every stage of the college process — more than once, from early high school through decision day. She built CollegeHound because she watched too many families wrestle with the same disorganization and stress hers did.
Ed Psyk
Co-founder & CTO
Ed leads engineering, security, and infrastructure at CollegeHound. Over his career he's held senior technical leadership roles — CTO, Chief Security Officer, and VP of Engineering — at companies including Microsoft, Deutsche Bank, and Itron, along with multiple startups.
That background shapes how CollegeHound is built: privacy and security are the foundation, not an afterthought. Ed believes your data is yours — never sold, never used to profile a child — and that good college guidance should be within reach of every family that wants it.
Ready to get organized?
CollegeHound Plus is free for the first 500 families through May 2027. No credit card. No hidden fees.
Claim Your Free Launch PassQuestions? [email protected]