The Almanac in brief
- What it is
- A free guide to all 3,964 degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States: costs after aid, admissions, graduation, earnings and debt, fields of study, campus safety and the town around campus.
- Where the figures come from
- Federal sources, mainly the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard and IPEDS. Every figure is labeled with its source and the year it describes.
- Current edition
- October 2026 edition, built on the College Scorecard release of October 15, 2026.
- Cost to use
- Free, with no account and no advertising.
- Independence
- No rankings and no predictions of anyone's chances of admission. Colleges can't pay to appear or to be listed higher.
- Publisher
- Auriginal LLC, an independent company in Virginia.
Using its figures in a story
Each college page shows where a figure comes from and the year it covers, and the sources page lists every dataset with its coverage and documentation. The figures are the colleges' own reports to the federal government, so the original source is the one to credit, for example: “U.S. Department of Education, College Scorecard, via The College Almanac.”
How the figures are put together, and what they can't tell you, is on the methodology page. If you find a figure that doesn't match its source, the corrections page takes the details.
Images
You're welcome to use these in coverage of The College Almanac.
- The ribbon mark, for light backgrounds ↓SVG
- The ribbon mark, for dark backgrounds ↓SVG
- The site's preview image, with the wordmark ↗PNG, 1200 × 630
- An example college card, front ↗PNG
- The same card, back ↗PNG
Please keep the mark's colors and proportions as they are, and don't combine it with a college's name or logo in a way that suggests the Almanac is affiliated with that college.
Contact
Write to contact@auriginal.app with questions about the Almanac or its data.