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US universities and their programs

Where the figures for us universities and their programs come from, how they were collected, and what checking every source link found. Used on /us/universities, /us/programs, /us/colleges-for, /us/colleges-in, /us/compare and /us/program-finder.

Last updated October 31, 2026.

How the figures were collected

The US university data covers 215 universities: every state's flagship, other large public universities, historically Black colleges and universities, the Ivy League, well-known private universities and liberal arts colleges, program by program.

  • One federal source for almost everything: the College Scorecard (US Department of Education), release of 15 October 2026, fetched 20 October 2026. Acceptance rate, the middle 50% SAT and ACT ranges, tuition in and out of state, the cost of a year and the net price by family income, retention, six-year graduation, undergraduate enrolment, median pay ten years after starting, and for every bachelor's program the median pay of graduates one, four and five years after finishing and their median federal debt. Where the Scorecard suppresses a figure because the cohort is small, the page says "too few graduates to publish".
  • Test policy (required, recommended, optional, not considered) from each school's own admissions page, re-read on 23 October 2026 for all 215 schools: 194 cite that page, and any condition (a GPA line, a college-by-college rule) is shown beside the policy; the 21 schools whose sites refused automated reading or state no policy keep FairTest's list for students applying in 2026-27, and their school pages say so. The Scorecard's own test policy field is not used, because it lags a year and was wrong for 24 of the schools.
  • What each school weighs in admissions (grades, rank, essays, recommendations) and tuition history, housing and institutional grants from the IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) surveys of the National Center for Education Statistics, read from the bulk data files.
  • Names, colours and landmarks from each school's own pages.

Not used: US News and Niche, whose sites refuse automated readers. Nothing about a US school comes from a ranking site.

In numbers

Pages with sources210
Citations211
Distinct source links210
Sites cited208

Every link, checked

Checked October 31, 2026: one request per link, as "ClaudeBot (research for career.help)", robots.txt honoured, no retries. A site that refuses automated visitors is recorded as refused, not retried under another name.

Reachable152
Moved (redirects)27
Refused automated check27
Not reachable4

The full result for this part, one line per link, is in the downloadable spreadsheet: check-2026-10-31.csv (all parts, with the page that cites each link in the inventory file beside it).

Links that did not answer or refused (31)

Each with the page that cites it. "Refused" means the site blocks our link checker; the figure was read when it was collected, from the page itself or from a dated archived copy, and a person opening it in a browser is noted where that happened. "Not reachable" links are being replaced or removed.

Every site cited (208)

Most cited first: every site with three or more links, and the first two hundred in any case. The rest are sites cited once or twice (a regulator's page, one school's calendar); every one of their links is on the page that cites it and in the spreadsheet above. 8 such sites are not listed here.

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