US College Finder: Filter by Admission Barriers & State

Shortlist US colleges the way a student actually decides: by how open the door is and how they can attend, not by trawling one school website at a time. Filter every Title IV college and university in the United States (~6,600 institutions) by open-admissions policy, online-only delivery, 2-year vs 4-year, public vs private, admission rate, test-score policy and state, and get one clean row per school with its official website and net-price calculator.

Data source

Official US Department of Education College Scorecard institution file (the same dataset behind collegescorecard.ed.gov). Downloaded fresh each run from the department's public download bucket. No API key, no login, no proxy.

Filters (input)

Field	What it does
states	Two-letter codes, e.g. CA, TX. Empty = all states/territories.
levels	4-year, 2-year, less-than-2-year. Empty = all.
controls	public, private-nonprofit, private-forprofit. Empty = all.
openAdmissionOnly	Keep only open-admissions schools (best proxy for "start soon, low barriers").
onlineOnly	Keep only schools that deliver exclusively online.
testNotRequired	Keep only schools that do not require SAT/ACT (see coverage note).
offersCredential	Keep schools offering programs at any of: certificate, associate, bachelor, graduate.
federalAidOnly	Keep only schools approved for federal Title IV student aid (Pell / federal loans).
maxAdmissionRate	Keep schools with admission rate at or below this (0-1).
keyword	Case-insensitive match on the institution name.
sortBy	name (state then name), admissionRate, or size.
maxRows	Cap on rows returned. Controls cost.

Output (one row per institution)

name, city, state, zip, level, control, openAdmissions, onlineOnly, admissionRate, testScoresRequired, undergradSize, credentialLevels, federalAidParticipating, pctStudentsWithPellGrant, pctStudentsWithFederalLoan, website, netPriceCalculator, scorecardUrl, unitId, opeId.

• credentialLevels is an array of the levels the school offers programs at, e.g. ["certificate","associate","bachelor"].
• federalAidParticipating is true when the school is approved for federal Title IV student aid; pctStudentsWithPellGrant and pctStudentsWithFederalLoan show the share of undergrads who actually receive each.

What this actor does not include (read before buying)

Two things students often want are not published in any national dataset, so this actor does not guess at them:

• Term start dates (Summer I / Summer II / Fall). There is no central feed for academic calendars; each school posts its own. Use the website link to read the current calendar at the source.
• "High-school transcript required." College Scorecard omits the IPEDS admission-requirement fields for secondary-school records, so a reliable transcript flag cannot be derived. The website link is where each school states its document requirements.

The openAdmissions, onlineOnly and testScoresRequired flags are the honest, data-backed signals for low-barrier, start-soon options.

• Aid eligibility for a specific program. federalAidParticipating is an institution-level flag: the school participates in federal Title IV aid. Whether one particular certificate or associate program qualifies for aid is program-level Title IV eligibility, which is not published as a clean flag in any national dataset (the field-of-study loan data is privacy-suppressed for ~78% of programs and reflects borrowing, not eligibility). So this actor reports which levels a school offers and whether the school takes federal aid, but not per-program aid eligibility.

Coverage notes

• openAdmissions is populated for ~85% of institutions; the rest come back as null (unknown, not "selective").
• testScoresRequired is reported by ~30% of institutions (mostly 4-year schools). When testNotRequired is on, schools with no reported policy are excluded rather than assumed.
• admissionRate exists mainly for schools that admit selectively; open and community colleges usually leave it blank.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.008 per institution row. The first 2 rows per run are free, so you can preview the shape of the output at no cost.

Example

{
  "states": ["TX"],
  "levels": ["2-year"],
  "openAdmissionOnly": true,
  "sortBy": "size",
  "maxRows": 100
}

Returns Texas community colleges with an open-admissions policy, largest first, each with a link to enroll.