About Undergradly

Undergradly is an editorial guide to undergraduate degrees — associate's and bachelor's only — built on federal data and one principle: measure what shapes a student's life after graduation. No reputation surveys. No peer-perception polls. No paid placements. The earnings, debt, mobility, and labor-market figures on this site come from IPEDS, College Scorecard, Census PSEO, BLS, and Opportunity Insights — public-record sources that students and families can audit themselves.

Our mission

Most college search sites answer the wrong question. They tell you which schools are prestigious, which are selective, or which match a brand preference — and leave the question students actually care about unanswered: will this degree pay off?

Undergradly is built around that question. Every page, ranking, and verdict on this site is anchored in measurable post-graduation outcomes: what graduates earn, what they borrow, whether they can repay it, and whether the degree changes their economic trajectory. We tell students when a path is honestly worth the investment, and we tell them — clearly — when it isn't.

Why Undergradly exists

Federal agencies have been publishing rich post-graduation outcome data for years — Treasury-linked earnings via the College Scorecard, Census-linked earnings via PSEO, mobility tracks from Opportunity Insights, occupational projections from BLS. The data exists. It's free. It's reproducible.

The problem is that it lives in a hundred CSV files, three different agencies, and half a dozen schemas — and most college search sites either ignore it or summarize it so loosely that the numbers stop being meaningful. The result is a market full of "best colleges" lists driven by surveys, brand recognition, and selectivity proxies that don't correlate with student outcomes.

Undergradly's job is to do the joining work — major to occupation, institution to earnings cohort, state to transfer destination — and surface the resulting picture in language a 17-year-old and their parents can act on.

What we cover (and what we don't)

Undergradly is intentionally narrow. We cover associate's and bachelor's degrees only. Sub-associate certificates, master's, doctoral, and professional programs are out of scope.

That choice isn't accidental. Undergraduate decisions are the highest-stakes, least-informed financial decisions most American families make: a $100,000+ commitment by a teenager, often with no debt-repayment math attached. Graduate programs have different incentives, different financing models, and a more sophisticated audience — they deserve their own analysis, not a footnote to ours. Keeping the scope tight is how we keep the data honest.

The site currently includes:

• 5,777 college profiles — every IPEDS-reporting institution offering associate's or bachelor's degrees, with outcome-first metrics surfaced before selectivity.
• 54 Worth-It / ROI analyses by major — earnings, debt-to-income, and labor-market signal for each major, with reference data from 2024.
• 51 state-level transfer pathway pages — feeder community colleges, top destinations, and outcomes by state.
• 27 2-year vs 4-year comparisons — true cost, time-to-degree, and earnings premium on each path.
• 5,104 institutions ranked across outcome-driven rankings (mobility, transfer-in, transfer-out).

Editorial standards

The rules we hold ourselves to:

• Federal data only. Every number on the site traces back to a named federal source. If we can't show you the file it came from, we don't print the number. See our data sources for the complete catalog.
• No reputation surveys. Peer assessments and "peer-perception" polls are not on our site, in any form. Reputation is a circular metric that rewards prestige and punishes accessibility — exactly the institutions that often deliver the highest economic mobility.
• No paid placements. No college pays to appear on Undergradly, for any ranking, list, or page. We do not run sponsored content. The only commercial relationships on the site are clearly-labeled affiliate links to widely-available student tools (FAFSA prep, scholarship platforms), and these never influence rankings or verdicts.
• Show the math. Every ROI verdict, ranking, and comparison page publishes the inputs and the formula. If you can't reconstruct our number on a napkin, we've failed.
• Surface the limitations. When a metric is blended, suppressed, or estimated, we say so on the page — not in a footnote at the bottom. See our limitations disclosure for the major ones.
• Update on a schedule. Every source is on an annual or biennial refresh cadence; pages are regenerated and timestamped when source data changes.

Who runs this site

Undergradly is built and maintained by Max, a software engineer who also runs the data pipeline behind the site. Max holds a Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering and a Master of Arts in Linguistics, with 20 years of professional software development experience — most of it spent building systems that turn large public datasets into something people can actually use. Earlier career work included technical writing and interpreting in industrial settings, and several years in international procurement.

Max also founded TradeColleges.org, which applies the same data-first approach to skilled-trade education. Every article on Undergradly is researched and written from the federal datasets described above; where a specific figure is cited, the source is linked in context. Questions or corrections go to contact@undergradly.org.

How to use the site

The five core tools, in roughly the order most students use them:

1. Worth-It — if you have a major in mind, start here. Each page answers "is this degree honestly worth it?" with debt-to-income math, earnings percentiles, and an explicit verdict.
2. Compare paths — 2-year vs 4-year cost and earnings comparisons by major. The 2+2 path (community college then transfer) is often the right answer for a much wider audience than mainstream college search sites suggest.
3. Transfer pathways — by state, with feeder community colleges, top destination four-years, and outcome data for receiving institutions.
4. College profiles — outcome-first profiles for every IPEDS-reporting undergraduate institution.
5. Rankings — three outcome-driven lists, each with its weights and tie-breakers published on a dedicated rankings methodology page.

How this site is funded

Undergradly is an independently-operated editorial project. It is not affiliated with any college, college-search platform, or admissions consultancy. The site generates revenue from two clearly-labeled sources only:

• Display advertising on a subset of pages, served by standard third-party ad networks. Advertisers do not see, influence, or vet content.
• Affiliate links to free or low-cost student tools (FAFSA help, scholarship search, financial-aid calculators), where they make sense in context. Affiliate relationships are disclosed inline and do not affect rankings, verdicts, or which colleges, majors, or pathways are covered.

Colleges cannot pay for inclusion, removal, ranking position, or favorable framing.

Contact & corrections

If a number on the site looks wrong — or you think a methodology choice is biased, misleading, or missing an important caveat — we want to hear about it. Corrections to outcome data are taken seriously, and credited corrections are noted on the affected pages.

For corrections, methodology questions, or press inquiries, see the contact page. For the full list of data sources powering the site, see data sources. For scoring rules, weights, and disclosure of limitations, see methodology.

Page last updated 2026-07-17.