One extra semester cost my friend $25,000. Nobody saw it coming. Including his parents.

I want to tell you about the moment that started this company. It isn't about software. It's about a phone call.

When I was choosing my own classes in college, it was complicated and confusing to the point of absurdity. Requirements in one portal, availability in another, progress in a degree audit I could barely read. Honestly, it felt like even the advisors were guessing.

But it wasn't my schedule that changed things. It was my friend's.

He found out, late in his degree, that he wasn't graduating on time. A required class hadn't been offered the term he needed it. His advisor, carrying hundreds of students, hadn't caught it. Every change to his schedule had quietly reset the path, and nobody could see the whole picture until the picture was already broken.

So he had to make the call. The one where you tell your parents that the finish line just moved. He graduated one semester late, and that one semester cost another $25,000 in tuition.

His parents would have done anything to prevent it. And there was nothing they could have done.

They watched him do everything right. They asked the right questions at dinner. Are you on track? Do you have what you need? And they got the answers every parent gets: yeah, I think so. Not because he was hiding anything. Because he genuinely thought so. The truth was buried across seven different tabs: degree audits, course catalogs, prerequisite chains, registration portals. A system that's confusing for the student living inside it, and completely invisible to the family standing behind them.

That's the position we put parents in. All of the investment. None of the visibility. And if they push harder, sit their kid down, demand the spreadsheet, call the advising office themselves, now they're interfering. Now it's a fight. Every parent of a college student knows that line, the one between helping and hovering, and how impossible it is to walk when you can't even see the ground.

Fewer than half of students finish a bachelor's degree in four years, according to U.S. Department of Education data. Behind a lot of those numbers is a family exactly like my friend's: invested, involved, willing, and locked out.

Students aren't failing at planning. Parents aren't failing at parenting. The system fails them both at the same time.

So we built the thing that didn't exist

Universities have had degree-mapping software for years, but it was only ever sold to schools, never to families. If you were a parent who wanted to put a real plan in your kid's hands, there was nothing to buy. You could pay $30,000 a year for college, and not $30 for a map of it.

Univyze is that map, and it's built so a parent can simply give it.

You send your student access. They put in their school, their major, and the credits they already have: AP, transfer, dual enrollment, all of it. One click, and it builds a complete term-by-term plan from today to graduation, checking every requirement against classes that are actually offered at their school. When something changes, a closed class, a new major, a study-abroad term, the plan rebuilds instead of resetting.

It even does the thing that felt impossible when my friend needed it: it can surface paths to finish early, using summers, interterms, and smarter sequencing. At today's tuition levels, even one semester sooner could mean thousands of dollars a family never has to spend. My friend's number was $25,000. Going the other direction is possible too.

And here's what it does for the family, which honestly might matter more. It lets you help without interfering. You're not managing their schedule. You're not calling their advisor. You're not asking questions that sound like doubt. And you're not waiting to be shown: your student can send you guest access, your own login, so you can see the plan from your own device, any time. The dinner conversation changes from "are you on track?" to actually knowing. Because for the first time, there's something to see.

Where we are

Univyze is live for students at four schools: UC Irvine, the University of San Diego, CSU Long Beach, and Chapman University, with plans built from each school's actual catalog and course offerings.

We're onboarding a limited number of families during launch so every plan gets built correctly. The first 100 families get $108 off Core, $180 off Plus, or $360 off Pro for the first year.

If your student is at one of these schools, it takes about sixty seconds to see if they qualify, and you can send them access today.