Financial Aid Award Letter Comparison Overlay

WHAT IT DOES

This userscript helps students compare financial aid offers by extracting and displaying key figures from award letters. It scans financial aid award letters, college financial aid portals, or scholarship award pages for key figures—total cost of attendance, grants, scholarships, work-study, loans, net cost, and out-of-pocket expenses. It displays a visual panel comparing multiple award letters side-by-side in a grid format. It extracts figures from text, calculates net cost after aid, highlights the best offer by net cost, and shows the breakdown of aid types. The script compares loan amounts, identifies gaps in aid, and exports the comparison as CSV or HTML. It suggests which school is most affordable and tracks additional costs like books and housing.

WHERE IT RUNS

The script works on financial aid award letters, college financial aid portals, scholarship award pages, and any page with financial aid figures. It runs entirely within your browser, reading only the visible content of the current page. It does not track your browsing history, access other tabs, or send any data externally. All award data is processed and stored locally.

HOW TO USE

After installation, open the panel by clicking the tool's icon in the BotGentz sidebar. Click "Scan page for award letters" to extract financial aid figures from the current page—the script detects school names, cost of attendance, grants, scholarships, work-study, and loans. The comparison grid shows all schools side-by-side with a color-coded breakdown. The best offer (lowest net cost) is highlighted with a trophy icon. Manually add schools using the "Add School" form with cost, grants, scholarships, work-study, and loans. The net cost is automatically calculated. Use the export dropdown to choose your format—CSV or HTML (report). Click "Export" to download.

THE TECHNICAL MECHANISM

This script uses text extraction to identify financial aid figures from page content. It detects school names using patterns like "University", "College", "School", "Institute", "Tech", "State", "Polytechnic", "Academy". It extracts cost of attendance, grants, scholarships, work-study, and loans using regex patterns with currency detection. Each award is stored with school name and all aid components. The net cost is calculated as cost of attendance minus total aid (grants + scholarships + work-study + loans + other). The comparison grid renders categories as rows and schools as columns, with the best offer highlighted in green. The HTML export generates a styled report with a table and best offer summary. All data is persisted using GM_setValue.

THE PANEL

The panel is draggable anywhere on the screen and remembers its position between sessions. It can be collapsed to a small floating bubble to minimize distraction, and expanded again with a single click. The panel's width can be adjusted, and pressing the Escape key closes it instantly. All settings and award data are persisted locally using GM_setValue, so your comparison remains intact across page reloads and browser restarts.

PLEASE NOTE

This userscript requires the free BotGentz extension to function. The script extracts figures from page text—it may not capture all numbers correctly. Review and adjust extracted data as needed. The net cost calculation assumes total aid equals the sum of all aid types. The script does not access external APIs or store any data outside your browser. No data from your browsing is stored or transmitted anywhere—all processing occurs entirely in your browser.