6,000+ Colleges and 229K Fields of Study: America's Education Data, Searchable

Choosing a college is one of the highest-stakes decisions a young person makes — and one of the most data-poor. Glossy brochures and campus tours tell you what a school wants you to see. Federal data tells you what actually happens after students enroll: graduation rates, loan default rates, earning outcomes, and how programs compare to peers across the country. ExploreBestColleges.com turns this data into 3 searchable platforms that give students, parents, and educators the facts they need.

6,000+ Colleges Ranked and Compared

The main college directory profiles over 6,000 colleges and universities across the United States, drawing from the Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the College Scorecard. Every institution — from Ivy League research universities to community colleges to trade schools — is represented with consistent, comparable data.

Each college profile includes admissions data (acceptance rate, test scores, application deadlines), enrollment figures (total students, demographics, full-time vs. part-time), financial information (tuition, fees, room and board, average financial aid), and outcomes data (graduation rate, retention rate, median earnings after graduation, and loan repayment rates). These metrics allow for genuine apples-to-apples comparisons that marketing materials deliberately obscure.

The outcomes data is particularly powerful. The College Scorecard tracks what graduates actually earn — broken down by institution and field of study — creating accountability that didn't exist a decade ago. When a school charges $60,000 per year but its graduates earn a median of $35,000, that's information prospective students desperately need before taking on six figures of debt.

229,000 Fields of Study

Choosing the right school is only half the equation — choosing the right program matters just as much. The degrees database catalogs 229,000 fields of study offered across American colleges and universities, providing program-level data that the main college profiles can't capture.

For every program, users can see the number of completions, the types of degrees offered (certificate, associate's, bachelor's, master's, doctorate), and — where available — earnings outcomes specific to that program at that institution. This granularity is critical because outcomes vary enormously by field of study. A computer science degree from a mid-tier state university may produce better earnings outcomes than a humanities degree from an elite private university, but you'd never know that from a school's overall ranking.

The database also reveals which programs are growing and which are contracting. Over the past decade, certain fields — data science, nursing, cybersecurity — have seen explosive growth in program offerings, while others have quietly disappeared from college catalogs. Tracking these trends helps students align their education with labor market demand rather than pursuing fields with shrinking opportunities.

99,000 Public Schools

Education data doesn't start at the college level. The public schools directory covers 99,000 K-12 public schools across the country, drawing from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data. Each school profile includes enrollment, student-teacher ratio, grade levels served, Title I status, and demographic breakdowns.

For parents evaluating where to live, school quality is often the deciding factor. While our platform doesn't assign subjective "ratings" that oversimplify complex realities, it provides the raw data that empowers parents to make informed comparisons. How does the student-teacher ratio at your neighborhood school compare to others in the district? What percentage of students qualify for free or reduced lunch — a proxy for the socioeconomic diversity of the student body? These are questions the data can answer.

Researchers and policy analysts also use the public schools database to study educational equity. By mapping school characteristics against demographic and economic data, patterns emerge: which districts are investing in smaller class sizes, which communities have experienced enrollment decline, and how school resources correlate with student outcomes.

Data-Driven Education Decisions

The education industry spends billions on marketing — every college wants to be perceived as selective, prestigious, and career-launching. Rankings from commercial publications add another layer of noise, using opaque methodologies that reward wealth and reputation over educational quality and student outcomes.

ExploreBestColleges cuts through this noise by presenting federal data directly. No proprietary rankings, no sponsored placements, no hidden methodologies. Just the data the Department of Education collects from every institution that receives federal financial aid — which is virtually all of them.

Visit ExploreBestColleges.com to search colleges, compare degree programs, and explore public school data. Every search is free, and every metric is sourced directly from federal education databases.

ExploreBestColleges is one of the education platforms built by TheDataProject.AI — making education data transparent, searchable, and accessible to everyone.