Browse Colleges & Universities

The alphabetical directory below lists institutions returned by PlainCollege's College Scorecard snapshot, including public flagships, regional comprehensives, community colleges, private nonprofit institutions, and private for-profit schools. The Scorecard's complete files principally cover active IPEDS institutions that participate in Title IV aid and can also include some non-Title-IV institutions that meet similar criteria.

For each institution we surface the canonical short name, the state of its primary campus, total fall undergraduate enrollment, and the ownership sector (public, private nonprofit, or private for-profit). Click any college to open its full profile, which includes admissions, tuition (sticker and net), federal student-aid usage, completion and retention rates, demographic breakdowns, and earnings outcomes 6 and 10 years after enrollment for federal-aid recipients.

Sort by name (alphabetical), enrollment (largest first), or ownership (grouped by sector). The alpha index above lets you jump directly to a starting letter; pagination steps through the directory 50 institutions at a time. Earnings and cost figures come from PlainCollege's current Scorecard snapshots. Institution-level earnings reflect federal-aid recipients, and values that do not meet the Department's reporting or privacy standards remain unavailable.

The directory uses Scorecard institution data retrieved in July 2026; the Department updates components several times per year rather than through one fixed fall release. IPEDS feeds institutional characteristics, federal student-aid systems feed aid and repayment measures, and Treasury-derived records feed earnings outcomes for federally aided former students. Each field retains the source agency's reporting lag and cohort definition.

Reading the directory: each row reports an institution's canonical short name, primary-campus state, total fall undergraduate enrollment, and ownership sector. The short name is what the institution registers with the Department of Education, not necessarily its colloquial name. If a school appears under an unexpected form (for example "The University of X" rather than "X University"), this typically reflects the official IPEDS registration. Use the search and alpha-index controls to find specific institutions; sort by enrollment when you want to compare scale.

Three ownership sectors are present in every state. Public institutions are funded by state governments and typically charge lower in-state tuition; private nonprofit institutions are funded by tuition, endowment, and philanthropy; private for-profit institutions are operated as businesses and rely primarily on student-paid tuition (often federal-aid–financed). Each sector has different cost structures, financial-aid practices, and outcome distributions, public flagship universities and private nonprofit research universities tend to have higher earnings, completion rates, and selectivity than community colleges or for-profit schools, but exceptions exist in every category.

When comparing schools across the directory, keep three measurement-level caveats in mind. First, earnings reflect federal-aid recipients; students who attended without federal aid are excluded, so the cohort is not the full student population. Second, entry-cohort earnings are measured at 6 and 10 years after enrollment, not after graduation; completers and noncompleters can both be represented. Third, the Department suppresses cells that do not meet reporting and privacy standards and applies additional privacy treatment to earnings. A "not reported" value can therefore be missing by design rather than by error.

The directory is fully searchable. Use the alpha index to jump directly to a starting letter, useful when you know the institution name but want the canonical Scorecard short form. Use the sort selector to change the default alphabetical order to enrollment-descending (largest institutions first) or to ownership-grouped (public/private nonprofit/private for-profit clustered). Pagination steps through fifty institutions at a time; the URL preserves your sort and letter selection so you can deep-link to a specific page.

Beyond browsing, our research tooling supports specific decision contexts. Compare lets you place up to four schools side-by-side across costs, earnings, admissions, and demographics. Near-you finds schools within commuting distance of a ZIP code with cost and earnings columns. Programs by major surface the earnings of any specific field-of-study (Computer Science, Nursing, Business Administration, Education, etc.) across all institutions where federal data permits, answering the question that the institutional aggregate cannot: "what do graduates of THIS field at THIS school actually earn?"