College/University list for populating an Auto-complete field? [closed]

Question

I'm trying to create an auto-complete text field with a list of known Universities and Colleges. Do you know where I can get this sort of list? Or is there a public API that contains this data?

Answer 1

I've found that IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) is probably the most authoritative source for this data (and tons more related to it), and it's easy to export.

That page has a bunch of different tools for exporting different sets of the data in various common ways, but they all wrap around the "Download Custom Data Files" tool which is the most basic.

For a list (rather than data on a single institution), you would go to that custom data file page, and click on "By Group" to select the actual filters to use to limit what list of institutions you want (and what year of datasets). Then you click "Search", and it will provide a sample list of your results. From there, you click "Continue" to select which variables you want in the report with each of the institutions you've already filtered down to.

There's tons of variables, but in this case, you'll find everything you need under "Institutional Characteristics" most likely. Once you've selected all of the columns of information you want, click the big "Continue" button up top. You will then be presented with a bunch of download links for your data in a few various formats including CSV.

Answer 2

For quick results, try http://ope.ed.gov/accreditation/GetDownloadFile.aspx - it has complete data sets ready to download with all the key information.

Answer 3

The US Federal Aid Application site (http://www.fafsa.ed.gov/) has a very complete list, although I'm not sure how many non-US universities are listed (some are).

You could consider starting an application and scraping the list.

Answer 4

After a few moments of review, I'm pretty sure that fafsa doesn't want that list used by the public or make it easily accessible to the public.

If you go to their school search form (https://fafsa.ed.gov/FAFSA/app/schoolSearch?locale=en_EN) it uses autocomplete to provide the filtered data. I didn't feel like looking for too long at the script to see if I could figure out a URI that might give the entire listing, but I'm pretty sure they don't want people using their bandwidth. I will continue looking elsewhere. I'll try to post back if I find something more like what we're looking for.

...I'm back. I found dbpedia.org as a possible source (for this & MUCH more). I also tweaked an example to list all it's universities in alphabetical order and saved the html output for my own use.

I also found http://infochimps.com/search?query=universities this site apparently only "deals" with datasets (some free, some not)

I'm still hoping to find a "straight up" web resource that I can ping with queries for JSON.

ahhhh what'ya gonna do!?!? 8)