Data Sources & Licensing

Five public sources supply nearly every figure on this site, plus the schools' own pricing pages. Below: what we take from each, its vintage, and its license. How raw files become published figures: our methodology.

College Scorecard — US Department of Education

We take median earnings 1 and 4 years after program completion, median federal debt at graduation, average net price, completion rates and accreditors from the institution and field-of-study files (current release: June 10, 2026). Earnings and debt cover federally aided graduates only; small cohorts are privacy-suppressed. US government work, public domain. collegescorecard.ed.gov/data

IPEDS — National Center for Education Statistics

We take published tuition and fees, enrollment, and the components behind "average net price." One caveat travels with every IPEDS net-price figure we cite: it is computed on first-time, full-time freshmen, which skews campus-ward for online programs. Public domain. nces.ed.gov/ipeds

Federal Student Aid — US Department of Education

We take the quarterly loan-portfolio reports: total balances, borrower counts, debt-size bands and borrower location. Current vintage: March 31, 2026 — $1,723.9 billion outstanding across 42.6 million borrowers. Public domain. studentaid.gov/data-center

Bureau of Labor Statistics

We take Education pays (CPS 2024 medians — our $48,360 high-school baseline), Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OES, May 2024 medians), and the Occupational Outlook Handbook. Public domain. bls.gov

Urban Institute — Education Data Portal

We use the portal's harmonized API over Scorecard, IPEDS and other federal collections to cross-check our own file pulls. Unlike the federal sources, this one carries a license condition — the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) v1.0: users must "attribute any public use of the database, or works produced from the database." As required: this site uses data made available by the Urban Institute's Education Data Portal under the ODC Attribution License.

The schools' own pricing pages

We take per-credit and per-term rates, required credit counts, mandatory fees and admissions terms from each school's published pages, with the fetch date printed in each article's footer — all 11 schools in our cheapest-online-colleges table were pulled July 10, 2026. Tuition changes by academic year; the fetch date tells you which year a price belongs to.

Vintages at a glance

What we never use

We do not scrape or republish data from Niche, US News, CollegeSimply or other commercial ranking sites — their terms of service forbid it. Community quotes appear as attributed testimony, never as statistics.