A note for parents and guardians

Your teenager wants to use Meriqen to find merit scholarships, and if they are 16 or 17, nothing happens until you say yes. This page is what you are saying yes to, in plain words: what Meriqen is, what it asks, what you will be able to see, and what we have deliberately built so that you cannot.

What Meriqen is

A catalogue of merit scholarships and a guide named Meri that helps a student find the ones that fit, keep track of deadlines, and do their own best work applying. Meriqen is free for students during the beta, collects no payment details, and never submits an application — your student applies on the sponsor’s own site, in their own name, with their own writing.

Meri is an educational guide and only that: not a licensed counselor, not an attorney, not a financial advisor. Parts of her guidance are AI-generated. Every scholarship fact she uses links to the sponsor’s own page with the date we last checked it, no award is ever guaranteed or promised, and she never claims to know a student’s odds of winning. She also never writes their essay — she asks questions, points at what is thin, and the writing stays theirs. Where a question needs a professional — legal status, money, immigration — the answer is that we do not advise there, and a pointer to someone qualified.

Your part, if your student is 16 or 17

• Nobody under 16 can have an account at all. If someone under 16 signs up, no account is created.
• A 16- or 17-year-old’s account starts switched off. You get an email; the account activates only after you approve, and until then it sends nothing and does nothing.
• You can change your mind. Withdrawing your approval pauses the account — nothing is deleted, and it stays paused until a guardian approves again.
• You can also close the account permanently. If you do, your student is emailed their full export first, to their own address — and if that email cannot be delivered, nothing is deleted. The notice you receive carries nothing from inside the account.

We keep one small record that a guardian approved this account — the date, and a scrambled form of the two email addresses that cannot be turned back into an address. We keep it so that if anyone ever asks whether a parent approved, we can answer honestly. We delete it three years later. Nothing else about the account is kept.

What you can see — and what we keep you from seeing

After approving, you get a read-only view of two things: which scholarships your student has matched or saved, and where each application stands. That is the whole view. Their essays, their notes, their conversations with Meri, their writing, their grades and scores — those stay theirs alone, by design, and the limit is enforced in the database itself, not just hidden in the app. We built it that way on purpose: a student writes honestly when the writing is theirs, and the point of all of this is that they do the growing.

What Meri asks, and why

To find awards a search box never surfaces, Meri asks about a student’s life: their activities and how far they have taken them, a job they hold, something they have started, JROTC or scouting, the language spoken at home — and two questions about your household, because the answers unlock money: where the parents or guardians work (many employers run scholarship funds for employees’ children) and any family military service (branch and era open specific doors). Every one of these questions is optional and skippable, nothing is required to use the catalogue, and the answers are used only to match and guide — never sold, never shared with sponsors. The full list, with the reason for each question, is in the Privacy Policy.

What we never ask for

No Social Security numbers, no bank or payment details, no exact household income, no FAFSA credentials, no documents. Legitimate merit scholarships do not charge fees, and neither do we — if anything claiming to be Meriqen asks your family for any of this, it is not us, and we would like to hear about it at privacy@meriqen.com.

The fine print, honestly

The full documents are short and written to be read: the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy. Questions, from either of you: privacy@meriqen.com. Meriqen is run by Property Sapiens LLC, a Texas LLC, in San Antonio, TX.

Meriqen does not award scholarships, is not affiliated with any university or sponsor, and does not guarantee eligibility or selection.