How we vet opportunities.
Reviewed by the editorial team · Last updated August 30, 2026
Every program in the Atlas has been reviewed against a public rubric. Here's exactly what we check, where listings come from, and how we remove ones that break.
1. Where listings come from
- Auto-discovery: A monthly job scans our curated list of trusted source pages (university research offices, foundation grant pages, fellowship aggregators) and uses AI to extract candidate listings. High-confidence candidates from trusted, live-verified hosts can publish automatically; everything else goes to a human review queue before it's public. We deliberately run this monthly rather than daily — a catalog of verified programs matters more than a constant trickle of unvetted ones.
- Community suggestions: Anyone can submit a program through /suggest. Submissions are reviewed manually.
- Editorial additions: Programs we discover through reporting, counselor outreach, or alum recommendations.
2. The vetting rubric
Every program must pass all five checks before it is published:
- Real organization. Run by a verifiable nonprofit, university, government agency, or established company.
- Open to high schoolers. Grade eligibility is stated on the host's own page, not inferred.
- No-fee or transparent cost. If there's a fee, it's disclosed clearly and a fee waiver path is documented.
- Working application path. The link goes to a live application page or the host's program info page — not a dead aggregator.
- Last verified within 90 days. A human or our link checker confirmed the page resolves in the last quarter.
3. How we score competitiveness
The "competitiveness" label (Open · Selective · Highly selective) is inferred from a combination of historic acceptance rates (when publicly available), cohort size, and the depth of the application requirement (e.g. essays, recommendations, research proposals). We mark it explicit when the host publishes a number, and inferred otherwise.
4. Link health
A daily job checks every program's primary URL with real browser headers, since some official sites block anything that doesn't look like one. A response we can't trust either way (rate-limited, blocked, a server error) is recorded as unverified — it never hides a listing on its own. Only a confirmed hard 404, 410, or DNS/SSL failure counts, and only after three consecutive confirmed checks is the listing hidden from the Finder. A hidden listing isn't deleted — it stays in the review queue until a human confirms the official page moved (and we update the link) or it's genuinely gone (and we remove it), logged on the changelog.
5. What we don't list
- Pay-to-play summer programs that exist primarily to monetize the college admissions race.
- Recommendation-only "honor societies" that charge a membership fee for a line item.
- Programs with opaque selection processes that won't disclose who they admit.
- Anything that requires sharing financial information before showing eligibility.
6. Reporting an issue
Every program page has a "Report an issue" link. Reports go to a moderation queue. Atlas is a small, student-led nonprofit, so there's no fixed SLA — see our governance page for how that works, and current resolution stats on the quality dashboard.