About
About CollegeScout
Why it exists, how it compares colleges, and where every number comes from.
Great college guidance shouldn't depend on what you can afford.
Families who can hire a private counsellor get someone to read the fine print. Everyone else gets rankings.
What actually makes a college right for you.
Compare every college on the same four things.
Admissions
How competitive is the school — and your intended program?
Academics
Does it actually offer what you want to study?
Campus Fit
What does it feel like to spend four years there?
Cost
What might the school actually cost your family?
Where our information comes from.
Our data comes from public sources, including Common Data Sets, IPEDS, College Scorecard, and college websites. When information isn't available, we say so rather than guess.
Over 330 colleges in the database — 198 public and 138 private, across all 50 states and DC. Chosen from federal IPEDS data by size and programmes offered, never by ranking.
Our data, source by source
College Scorecard
Admit rate and tuition figures come from the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard, a federal dataset built from schools' own reporting. Every Scorecard-sourced number on this site is labeled with its source and award year directly under the figure.
University-reported data
Fields Scorecard doesn't publish — GPA and test score ranges, in-state/out-of-state admit rate splits, programs, and campus details — come from a mix of each school's own Common Data Set, admissions pages, and other public sources. Some of these have been individually verified against a specific, dated source; most have not been yet. We're working through them school by school, and figures without a confirmed source are approximate rather than guaranteed exact.
Career outcomes
We don't show them. Placement rates and starting salaries are published inconsistently — different cohorts, different time windows, different response rates — and we'd rather show nothing than a number we can't point to a source for. They'll come back once each one is verified against the school's own reporting.
Questions and corrections
Every figure here is meant to trace back to a source you can check yourself. If one looks out of date, or you want to know how we arrived at a number, write to us — corrections are checked against the school's own page and fixed. hello.collegescout@gmail.com