Who We Are
For many prospective college students, choosing the right school can be a challenging first step. CollegeChoice is a comprehensive online resource dedicated to helping students make this important selection. Our free guides cover a wealth of topics, including degrees and concentrations at the undergraduate and graduate level, tuition costs and financial aid options, and student outcomes. Our site also features industry and career profiles for job-seeking graduates.
We place great value on editorial independence, transparency, and data-driven content. Each guide published on CollegeChoice is thoroughly vetted to ensure the information is unbiased, current, and accurate.
How We Make Money
CollegeChoice is supported by advertising certain schools that pay us for student referrals. We may receive financial compensation when visitors use our program search tool or interact with onsite advertisements.
We understand these advertisements may cause confusion for readers. For this reason, we take extra measures to distinguish these ads from editorial content found elsewhere on the page. Each advertisement is clearly labeled as an "ad" or "advertising disclosure." Additionally, our advertising agreements with schools never influence our editorial content in any way. Transparency about how and why we are paid is a top priority.
How We Maintain Editorial Independence
We generate each college guide, ranking, and list based on a proprietary evaluation system that takes dozens of individual metrics into account. These include tuition and fees, admission and graduation rates, average class sizes, faculty credentials, and student resources. After collecting data, every school earns an overall score that determines its spot in a given ranking. This comprehensive methodology ensures every CollegeChoice resource is completely unbiased.
Our writers and fact-finders obtain data and information from reputable sources such as the National Center for Education Statistics, the Common Data Set Initiative, and Peterson's. We may also feature original content based on other sources, such as online surveys or expert interviews, but we don't publish any data points that come from questionable sources. In addition to our strict standards for sources, our contributors abide by the following editorial guidelines:
- Advertising agreements with colleges and universities never influence our content. In other words, schools cannot pay to be included in one of our rankings or guides.
- No school receives preferential treatment. Each institution is evaluated based on the same methodology system.
- We understand the importance of transparency and editorial integrity. For this reason, our contributors frequently evaluate content to ensure it is unbiased, accurate, and current. Every writer, editor, and fact-finder is committed to journalistic excellence.
- As a rule, we only include schools in our rankings that are fully accredited at the national or regional level. This measure provides added quality assurance and transparency to our content.
If you have additional questions about CollegeChoice, feel free to visit our FAQ page.