About
CampusFindr is a search tool for colleges in the United States. It leads with net price, the amount a family actually pays after grant aid, instead of the published sticker price.
I built CampusFindr because it's what I wanted a few years ago, when I was the one applying to colleges. The databases that already existed had the numbers, but using them felt like paperwork — a search box, a dense table, tuition buried a few clicks in. None of it made me want to stick around and actually compare schools.
A map you could drag around, with the real price up front instead of the sticker price, seemed like it would make the whole thing less miserable. So I built that instead.
Sticker prices tell you very little. A college advertising $84,000 a year can cost $6,000 after aid. One advertising $30,000 can cost $25,000. Sorting by sticker price puts the wrong schools in front of you, and it talks families out of applying to places they could afford.
Every price on this site is a net price. Where a school also publishes a sticker price, it sits beside the net price with a line through it.
The figure is an average across students who received federal aid. What you pay depends on your family's income, your assets, the school's own aid policy, and any merit award you win. Use it to compare schools, not to build a budget. Setting a household income narrows the average to your income band at schools that publish one, which gets closer, though it is still an average.
Every figure on this site comes from the College Scorecard, published by the US Department of Education, with one exception: athletic division, explained below. Nothing else is estimated, adjusted, or filled in by hand.
Scorecard publishes nothing about athletics, so a school's NCAA division — Division I, II, or III — isn't in the data it provides. Where a school shows one, it was matched by hand against Wikipedia's Division I, Division II, and Division III membership lists, using the school's own name and state to line the two sources up.
That matching is imperfect and won't ever be complete. A school showing no division usually means it simply isn't in the NCAA — most two-year colleges compete in the NJCAA instead, a separate body this site doesn't track — but it can also mean the match failed on a name Scorecard and Wikipedia spell differently. Absence here is not proof a school has no team.
Unlike the rest of the site, this isn't refreshed daily alongside Scorecard. It's pulled once and updated by hand, so a school that changes divisions mid-season won't be reflected until the list is redone.
The site pulls from Scorecard once a day, which keeps it level with Scorecard. That is not the same as the numbers being recent.
Scorecard publishes roughly once a year, and each release describes an academic year that has already finished. The figures here run a year or two behind as a result. A school that changed its aid policy last spring will look unchanged on this site until Scorecard catches up. Before you rely on a number for a decision, run the school's own net price calculator as well.
A school needs both a published net price and map coordinates to be listed here. 58 of the 2,698 schools that matched were dropped for missing one of those. They are absent from the map, the lists, and the search box.
The query behind the site asks Scorecard for schools that are currently operating, enroll 500 students or more, and award at least an associate degree. Very small colleges and certificate-only trade schools fall outside that and never appear.
Scorecard reports 38 program families, not individual majors. "Engineering" means a school awards at least one degree somewhere under engineering. It does not tell you whether the school teaches aerospace engineering, or whether that department is any good. Treat the filter as a way to rule schools out, then check the school's own course catalogue.
Scorecard classifies a school by the highest degree it awards. A community college that has added a few bachelor's programs counts as four-year here, which is why some schools with "Community College" in the name turn up in four-year lists. Two-year schools are hidden until you ask for them, because their much lower prices otherwise fill every cheapest-first list.
Scorecard publishes nothing about what a school asks for in an application, so this site says nothing about essays, recommendations, interviews or portfolios. Check the school's own admissions page, or the Common Application if it uses one.
This site does not rank colleges and is not going to. Rankings largely measure prestige and selectivity, neither of which tells you whether a school suits the person applying. The sorting options use figures you can check yourself: price, acceptance rate, graduation rate, distance from where you live.
Graduation rate needs a caveat of its own. A low rate is not automatically a weak school. Colleges enrolling more low-income students, part-time students and transfers report lower rates for reasons that have little to do with how well they teach.
CampusFindr is an independent project with no connection to any school. No college pays to be listed, to rank higher, or to be shown first. There is no advertising on the site and no affiliate arrangement behind any link.
There is no account and nothing to sign in to. The site keeps one value in your browser, a flag saying you have already seen the opening prompt, and that never leaves your device. Your filters and shortlist live in the address bar, which is why sending someone the link sends them the same results.
The distance filter asks your browser for your location. The distance is worked out on your own machine and the coordinates are not sent to this server or anywhere else. Declining the prompt turns that one filter off and changes nothing else.
Page views are counted using Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies and does not build a profile of anyone. It records that a page was loaded, the country it was loaded from, and which site linked here. It cannot follow you anywhere else, and neither can this one.
If a figure looks wrong, it almost certainly arrived that way from Scorecard, and the correction belongs with the Department of Education rather than here. If something on the site itself is broken, write to campusfindr.com@gmail.com.