This repository is not a mirror of institutional websites or documents. It is a registry of normalized cost-of-attendance facts with source citations.
College Cost of Attendance, the data repository
This data repository is an open standard for describing the cost of attendance for colleges and universities worldwide. The project was born out of the CollegeCompare web application project and the intense frustration with the non-standard communications from schools regarding their cost of attendance. We hope that the schools will adopt this methodology and support its existence and the mission of CollegeCompare. Everything we do is with the intention of making the decision for higher education (a) transparent, (b) fully observable, and (c) free.
We encourage the use of AI and automated tools to get data into this repository. Use AI but remember that you must verify the data against the source and double check its accuracy and make sure the provenance URLs that you submit are bona fide and relevant.
We are not a social ranking service. The data in this repository is used in the decision-making process for students, not to rank schools against other schools in a competitive arena of marketing.
Our customer is you, the student, who is inundated with external inputs that are confusing and elicit indecisiveness. This repository and the CollegeCompare student tool is designed to mitigate that indecision, but not eliminate it. The humans around you are the invaluable resource for making your final determination on a higher education path. Our data is meant to normalize the arena.
The school UnitID can be found with a search at the NCES - https://nces.ed.gov/ - via this search URL: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/InstitutionByName.aspx