Terms of Service

These terms are the agreement between LearnWise College Consulting ("LearnWise", "we", "us") and you — the parent or legal guardian who engages us. Accepting an engagement confirmation, or paying a retainer, means you agree to them.

Your child is not a party to this agreement. A student under eighteen cannot be bound by it, is not asked to accept it, and does not accept it by attending a session. Where these terms describe something the student will do, you are agreeing to it on your family's behalf as their parent or guardian.

By engaging us you confirm that you are at least eighteen, that you are the parent or legal guardian of the student, and that you have the authority to enter into this agreement for your family.

Where two parents or guardians share responsibility, the one who engages us is the person we correspond with and bill, unless you both tell us otherwise in writing.

Parts of this agreement describe how LearnWise will work once its billing and its client portal are running. Neither is switched on yet, and we would rather set out the terms in advance than post them the week we start charging.

What exists today: this website, a free initial consultation, and an enquiry form. That is all. Nothing on this site can take a payment, there is no client account and no page on which to ask for one, and no retainer has ever been billed.

What does not exist yet: the recurring retainer and its Stripe billing (section 6), the online cancellation route (section 7), and the client portal (section 9). Those sections are written in the conditional — “will” rather than “does” — and they take effect only once each is genuinely available.

Until billing exists there is nothing to cancel, and nothing you could owe. If you have had a consultation with us, you have bought nothing and you owe us nothing.

We will not switch any of it on without posting a revised version of these terms first, with a new effective date. Before your card is ever charged you will be shown the price, the interval and the cancellation route, and asked to agree to them then.

LearnWise is a private college-consulting and long-term mentorship service for students in grades 7 through 12, working in the San Francisco Bay Area. The service is designed to be engaged years before an application is written, and the work is built around that.

The work is planning, coaching and mentorship: a grade-by-grade roadmap, course and testing strategy, honest guidance on which activities are worth a student's time, coaching on essays in the student's own voice, and straight answers for you on the decisions that are hard to make alone.

What your family gets, how often we meet, and who your student meets with are set out in the engagement confirmation we send you before you pay anything. These terms and that confirmation are read together; where the confirmation is more specific about the work, the confirmation governs.

We are an independent private service. We are not a school, not a licensed placement agency, and not affiliated with any university, school district or testing organisation.

We do not guarantee admission to any college or university, and we do not guarantee a scholarship, financial aid, a score, a grade, or any other outcome. We make no claim about acceptance rates, results, or where our students have been admitted, and no statement of ours should be read as an outcome promise.

We are not a replacement for your child's school. We do not speak for their counsellor, teachers or administration, we do not override what the school tells you, and their school's own counselling remains the authority on the school's requirements, deadlines and transcripts.

We do not write essays for students, and we do not supply text for a student to submit as their own. What goes to a school is written by the student.

We do not contact admissions offices on a family's behalf, advocate with an admissions officer, or claim influence with anyone who decides an application. We do not submit applications, do not create or sign in to a student's application or testing accounts, and do not correspond with a school as though we were the student or the parent.

We do not provide legal, tax, financial, immigration, medical or mental-health advice, and nothing we say should be relied on as any of those. We do not prepare or file financial-aid forms.

Everything a student submits to a school, a program or a testing body must be that student's own work. This is not only their school's rule and the application's own rule; it is ours, and it is not negotiable.

We will read drafts, ask hard questions, say plainly when something is not working, and push a student toward a better version of their own thinking. We will not write, rewrite or ghostwrite an essay or a supplement, complete an assignment, produce work a student presents as theirs, or sit any test or assessment.

Applications require the applicant to certify that the work they submit is their own. We will not help a student make that certification falsely. If we are asked to, we will say no, and we may end the engagement.

Nothing we prepare for your family — a roadmap, a note, a worked example, a piece of feedback — may be represented to a school as the student's own work.

The initial consultation is free and carries no obligation. Nothing is charged for it and nothing is owed after it. It exists so that both sides can decide whether this is a good fit before any money changes hands.

An engagement begins only after that conversation, when we send you an engagement confirmation setting out the scope of the work and the fee, you accept it, and the first payment goes through. Until all three of those have happened, you have not bought anything and you owe us nothing.

Our fees are quoted per family. They depend on the student's grade, the scope of the work and how often we meet, so there is no price list on this site and nothing here is a quote. The fee for your family is stated in your engagement confirmation, in writing, before you pay.

No fee has been charged through this site and no retainer is currently billed — see “What exists today” above. The rest of this section is how billing will work when it starts.

Ongoing work will be billed as a recurring retainer. The retainer will renew automatically at the interval stated at the point of purchase — for example each month, or each academic term — and will continue until it is cancelled.

Before any card is charged, you will be shown the price, the billing interval, the fact that the retainer renews automatically until you cancel, and how to cancel it. Afterwards we send you the same terms and the cancellation instructions in writing, in a form you can keep. Where the law requires a reminder before a renewal, you will get one.

If we change the price or the billing interval, we will tell you before the change takes effect, and in time for you to cancel first if you would rather not continue. A change never applies to a period you have already paid for.

Payments will be processed by Stripe. Card details will go to Stripe, not to us — LearnWise will not see, handle or store your card number. Stripe's own terms and privacy notice will govern what it does with that information. No card details have ever been collected by this site.

If a payment fails, we will tell you, and we may pause sessions until it is resolved rather than quietly continuing and billing you later.

Nothing is billed today, so there is nothing to cancel. This section is the commitment we are making about cancellation before we ever charge anyone.

You will be able to cancel at any time, online, in the same place and the same way you signed up. You will not have to telephone us, post a letter, sit through a retention call, or give a reason. Once billing exists, the cancellation route will be in your client account and in every billing receipt we send. Until then — and at any time afterwards, if you would simply rather write to a person — emailing consultinglearnwise@gmail.com is enough, and we will act on it.

Cancelling stops the next renewal. It takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and until that period ends nothing changes — the sessions and access you have paid for are still yours.

We do not refund a period that has already begun. The time is reserved for your student and the work runs through the period, so once a period is under way it is not refundable — but it is also the last one you will be billed for once you have cancelled.

If we are the ones who end an engagement, we refund the unused part of the current period.

If California law gives you a cancellation or refund right greater than the one described here, that law applies and nothing in this section cuts it down.

We may end an engagement ourselves, on reasonable notice, if we are asked to do something we consider dishonest, if fees go unpaid, or if the working relationship has stopped being useful to your student. Where we do, you are not charged for a period that has not started.

Sessions are scheduled by agreement between us and your family. Unless we arrange otherwise, they are held online at a time we have both confirmed.

If a session has to move, tell us as far ahead as you can. The notice we ask for before rescheduling, and what happens to a session missed without that notice, are stated in your engagement confirmation.

If we have to move a session, we will offer your student another time at no additional charge.

Sessions are with the student. You are welcome to join, and you will hear from us about what your student is working on either way — see the section on confidentiality for how we handle what a student tells us.

There is no client portal today, and no account can be created. This section is how it will work when there is one.

Ongoing clients will get a private account for scheduling, materials and billing. It will be for your family, and the sign-in will belong to you as the parent or guardian. Access will be by invitation after an engagement begins — there will be no public sign-up.

Once you have one: keep the sign-in details to yourself and tell us promptly if you think someone else has them. Please do not share access outside your family, and do not use the account to try to reach anything that belongs to another family.

We may suspend an account if we believe it is being used by someone who should not have it, and we will tell you if we do.

How a student's own access will work, and what a parent will be shown and asked to agree to before a student account is created, is set out in the Privacy Policy rather than here, because it is a question about data rather than about the deal.

The roadmaps, plans, worksheets, reading lists, session notes, templates and other materials we prepare belong to us. We license them to you and your student to use for your own family, for as long as we are working together and afterwards — keep them, print them, use them.

What you may not do is sell them, publish them, post them publicly, pass them to other families, or use them to run a consulting or tutoring service of your own.

Your student's own work is theirs, entirely. Essays, projects, applications and anything else the student writes belong to the student; nothing here gives us any claim over them. We do not publish a student's work, name, school or results, and do not use them in anything of ours, without your written permission.

University and college names, seals, logos and other marks belong to the institutions that own them, not to us. Where a school is named in our materials or on this site, it is named to refer to that school and for no other purpose.

LearnWise is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, approved by, or connected in any way to any university, college or school named anywhere in our materials or on this site. No institution has reviewed, approved or authorised anything we do.

Naming a school is not a claim of a relationship with it, and it is not an indication of where any student will be admitted.

What you and your student tell us stays between your family and the mentors working with them. We do not discuss one family's situation with another, and we do not use a student's name, school, scores or story in anything public without your written permission.

Because you are the client, we will keep you informed about what your student is working on and how it is going. We do not promise a student confidentiality from their own parent, and we will not withhold from you anything you need to know. Equally, we do not relay every passing remark — where a student asks for something to stay between them and their mentor, we use judgement.

We may disclose information where the law requires it, or where we believe in good faith that someone is at immediate risk of serious harm.

How we handle personal information — what we collect, who processes it, how long we keep it, and how to see, correct or delete it — is set out in our Privacy Policy, linked below. That policy forms part of this agreement.

We will provide our services with reasonable professional care and skill, and by people competent to do the work. That is a real commitment and we mean it.

Beyond it, and to the fullest extent California law allows, our services and materials are provided as they are, without warranties of any kind, express or implied — including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.

In particular, we do not warrant that a plan will produce any particular result, that a school's requirements, deadlines, policies or admission rates will stay as they are, or that information that was accurate when we gave it to you will remain accurate.

Some warranties and some consumer rights cannot be disclaimed or waived under California law — among them your rights under the Consumers Legal Remedies Act, which Civil Code § 1751 makes unwaivable. Nothing in these terms disclaims those, and nothing here asks you to give up a right California law says you keep.

Where we are liable to you, our total liability for all claims arising out of your engagement is limited to the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose.

We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, and we are not liable for an admissions decision, a scholarship decision, a test score, a grade, a place in a program, or an opportunity you believe was lost. Those are not ours to control, and we never promised them.

This section does not limit what California law does not permit us to limit. Civil Code § 1668 makes a contract void where it tries to exempt a party from responsibility for its own fraud, wilful injury to another, or violation of law, whether wilful or negligent — and nothing here attempts any of that. Nor does anything here limit liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or affect your unwaivable consumer rights.

This agreement is governed by the law of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Any dispute arising out of it will be brought in the state or federal courts located in California, and we each agree to those courts. That is your home forum as well as ours; we are not sending a Bay Area family somewhere else to be heard.

There is no arbitration clause in these terms, and no waiver of your right to a jury or to take part in a class action. If that ever changes, we will tell you before the change takes effect, and you will be able to cancel first.

Before either of us goes near a court: write to us. Most of what goes wrong between a family and a consultant is fixable in one honest conversation, and we would much rather have it.

If we change these terms materially, we will update the effective date at the top of this page and post the revised terms at this same address before the change takes effect. If the change affects an engagement that is already running, we will tell you directly rather than leaving you to notice.

A change never applies retroactively to a period you have already paid for. If you do not want to accept one, you can cancel, exactly as described above.

These terms, your engagement confirmation and our Privacy Policy are the whole of the agreement between us on this subject, and they replace anything said beforehand. If any part of them turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.