New school profiles in the school categories

We are moving away from having school profiles on a separate part of the site and moving them directly to the school categories on the forum. The data is coming from the Department of Education’s IPEDS Data Collection System and reflects the August 21, 2024 release. Our primary goal is to encourage search engines (particularly Google) to return College Confidential in search results.

We are starting with relatively low-traffic schools and will add more as we validate the changes are accomplishing their goal. I’d also like to gather some feedback for how these pages could be more useful for people who come across them. Here are three samples:

As you can see, there are a few variations to the template based on the data. As a result, these are very “just the facts” sorts of topics and present the data without much in the way of narrative or media. This is by design.

For the moment I’m mostly looking for small changes that have a big impact. IPEDS has a a ton of data we could show, but I want to make sure the profile isn’t overwhelmed with data that few people would benefit from. What do you look for in a college profile?

This looks good, and has almost everything I’d look for.

Can you add application deadlines and admission plans: (R/SC)EA, ED1, ED2, and Rolling?

It’ll also be helpful to include the date the IPEDS data was pulled, so readers know how recent the information is.

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Oddly this data does not seem to be included in IPEDS. I do link to the CC decision date calendar[1] which has the information for many, but not all, schools. We’d like to encourage people to register and contribute there, if possible.


  1. Unfortunately, it’s the old one. I will need to fix that. ↩︎

That calendar is helpful, but those are decision dates, not application dates. While a majority of schools have a Nov 1 early deadline, many schools have other deadlines. RD application dates vary even more, and there might be different deadlines for scholarships or honors consideration.

I realize it’s not easy, but if this information can somehow be included, it would be super helpful to applicants. Is there a way to scrape this from CC’s EA/ED deadlines page?

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Derp. Yes, you are correct. I think we can use that page to populate the About pages too. Thanks!

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This is great!!!

In addition to the application deadlines DadofJerseyGirl suggested, which I think can be easily linked to the CC calendar, if we can pull the ED and WL numbers those can be helpful for families.

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