Data and Editorial Standards

This page describes how the content on this site is actually produced. It is a description of process, not a promise of perfection - and it ends with how to tell us when we get something wrong.

Where our numbers come from

Every statistic on this site traces to a named public source, cited where the number appears:

• School data - U.S. Department of Education IPEDS (institutional characteristics, completions, distance-education flags) and the College Scorecard (net price, graduation, retention, and earnings outcomes).
• Salary and employment data - U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics; Employment Projections).
• Local context on city pages - U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey.

We do not publish estimates dressed as data. Where a figure cannot be sourced, we write without it.

How school listings are ranked

Every automated school list on this site is ordered by the BOC Score, computed from published federal outcome data - graduation rate, median graduate earnings, average net price, retention, and online availability - under weights disclosed on our methodology page. Schools without enough federal outcome data to score appear after ranked schools rather than being hidden.

Two things the ranking never uses: our commercial relationships, and any information supplied by schools themselves.

Advertising disclosure

This site earns revenue from sponsored school listings, which appear in clearly labeled widgets. Sponsored placement is sold; editorial ranking is not. A school cannot pay to appear in, move up in, or be removed from a BOC Score list, and the ranked lists render from the same federal data whether or not a school advertises anywhere.

How pages stay current

School listings are generated from our data files at every site build rather than written into pages by hand, so when the underlying federal data updates, every listing that depends on it updates with it. Automated checks run against the content for unsupported claims - guarantees, unsourced figures, outdated accreditation language - and pages that fail are corrected before publication.

Corrections

If a number on this site does not match its cited source, we want to know. Email the address on our contact page with the page URL and the discrepancy; verified errors are corrected in the next site build, and the underlying data pipeline is fixed so the error cannot recur.