Most higher-education data worth having is either locked inside a five-figure subscription or scattered across a dozen federal download portals that don't speak to each other. We took the second problem and solved it in public: one tool, every U.S. college and university, benchmarked against the peers that actually matter, and we made it the most comprehensive higher-ed public data and analytics platform we could build, then made it free forever.
The seventeen sources behind every profile
Each institution profile is assembled from official, public data, not a vendor's black box. The point isn't that any one number is new; it's that they finally sit in one place, on one page, next to a peer median.
Thirteen official federal collections:
- College Scorecard (U.S. Dept of Education): admissions, net price by income, debt, and post-enrollment earnings.
- IPEDS (NCES / U.S. Dept of Education): enrollment, retention, completion, student-faculty ratio, and the full institutional finance picture.
- American Community Survey (Census) (U.S. Census Bureau): earnings-premium benchmarks for the regions graduates actually live in.
- NSF HERD research-spending survey (National Science Foundation): research expenditure, the denominator for any honest research claim.
- BLS Employment Projections (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics): a ten-year field-demand outlook mapped to each school's programs.
- NIH RePORTER (National Institutes of Health): biomedical grant funding, awarded and current.
- Clery Act campus-safety data (U.S. Dept of Education): reported campus crime, normalized per student.
- EADA athletics data (U.S. Dept of Education): athletics participation and revenue.
- Federal Student Aid Direct Loan portfolio (U.S. Dept of Education): Grad PLUS exposure and loan-volume signals.
- Federal Student Aid financial-responsibility data (U.S. Dept of Education): the federal composite solvency score and cash-monitoring status.
- Federal Audit Clearinghouse Single Audits (GSA / OMB): going-concern opinions, control weaknesses, and audited federal spend.
- IRS Form 990 filings (Internal Revenue Service): contributions, bond debt, and officer compensation share at private institutions.
- USAspending federal award data (U.S. Treasury): which federal agency actually funds the institution, and how concentrated that is.
And four public non-federal sources:
- WICHE Knocking at the College Door (WICHE (interstate compact)): home-state high-school-graduate projections, the demand-side enrollment cliff, by state.
- OpenAlex scholarly index (OpenAlex): published works, citations, and institutional h-index.
- Wikipedia (Wikimedia): public attention, measured as pageview demand.
- Wikidata (Wikimedia): founding year and stable public identifiers.
What you can actually see
All 5,745 institutions carry a full profile, four-year and two-year alike: enrollment and admissions, cost and aid, student outcomes, and a complete financial-health read, each metric shown with its value, its percentile, and its peer-group median, with multi-year trends where the data supports them. On top of the profiles sit head-to-head comparison, national rankings, state-by-state views, and distribution and map charts for exploring the whole sector at once.
A number without its peer median is trivia. The same number against the right comparison group is a decision.
The peer grouping is the part that takes the work: instead of comparing a regional teaching university to the Ivy League, the tool benchmarks each school against its Carnegie-classified peers, the institutions it genuinely competes with for students, faculty, and dollars.
Why it's free forever
Two reasons, and we'll be straight about both. First, the underlying data is public and largely paid for by taxpayers; gatekeeping a repackaged version of it behind a paywall has never sat right with us. Second, the tool is how prospective partners meet our work. Enrollment and finance leaders who use it to settle an internal debate already know what we can do before the first conversation. The public tool stays free; the bespoke dashboards and advisory work are where we charge.
So there is no login wall, no trial clock counting down, and no "request a demo" gate between you and the numbers. Free forever means the public University Intelligence tool (search, profiles, comparisons, rankings, and state pages) stays open to anyone, indefinitely.
How to use it this week
- Settle one positioning debate. Pull your school and its peer median for net price, completion, and median earnings before you sign off on next cycle's messaging.
- Pressure-test a feeder market. Check the WICHE projection for the states you recruit from hardest, then decide whether the plan assumes a market that's actually shrinking.
- Find your open lane. Look for a metric where you beat your peer median and your program pages don't say so. That gap is free marketing.
Bottom line
We built the most comprehensive higher-ed public data and analytics platform we know how to build, sourced it entirely from official public data, and left the gate open. Look up your institution, check it against its real peers, and keep what's useful.