One-stop site for comparing typical course loads across several schools?

[skieurope]

to graduate from xyz university, the student must complete 210 credits" without a handy decoder nearby saying whether every single academic course is 6 credits? 5?

Many universities will have course catalogs online which you can peruse, but AFAIK, there is no single chart.

Northwestern is weird in that virtually all classes count as 1 unit even some can be quite a bit more demanding than others.

Not that weird. Penn is the same. Harvard counts almost all classes as 4 credit classes, whether it’s a seminar meeting 2 hours per week or a science class meeting 3 hours per week for lecture, 1 hour for recitation, and 4 hours for lab.