How does your school actually compare to its peers?
Common Data Set reports — the ones colleges actually file — parsed for 44 U.S. universities, up to 18 years deep. Pick a school. See how its admit rate, tuition, financial aid, and graduation rate stack up against any peer group, year by year.
What surprised us in the data
Or jump to explore →The sub-5% club is real, and it's eight schools
Caltech, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, Yale, UChicago, Princeton, MIT all admit fewer than 1 in 20 applicants.
Michigan got 196,620 applications. That's not a typo.
Application volume has separated from selectivity. Michigan and NYU are reading more applications than Caltech and Stanford combined.
In-state public flagships still cost ~5× less than top private schools
Georgia Tech in-state tuition: $10,512. Boston College: $72,180.
Why UC schools have the lowest yields in the dataset
UChicago: 88% of admitted students enroll. UC Riverside: 12%.
Northeastern's transformation
Admit rate dropped from ~30% to 5.2% in roughly a decade.
Stanford and the test-optional rebound
Stanford's 2025-26 CDS reinstates a standardized test requirement.
Why this exists
College admissions reporting is dominated by rankings and marketing. But every U.S. university files a Common Data Set — a standardized, machine-unfriendly PDF — that contains the actual numbers. Parsed and stitched together, those CDSes let you ask basic, useful questions: is my kid's school an outlier on grant aid? Is yield going up or down? Did the test-optional era inflate medians?
This is just the data — no rankings, no scoring. Pick a school, pick a peer group, see what's there.