Data Sources and Verification

Universities' own pages

Program facts — awarded degree, specialty, professional purpose, format and campus visits, practicum and internship, credits, length, admissions, tests, deadlines, tuition, fees, funding and licensure disclosures — come from each university's own program, catalog, graduate school, admissions, bursar and funding pages, on the university's own domains. Each fact is stored with its URL and a verbatim quote. Before publication a script re-fetches the page and searches for the quote; when it is not found, the fact is not shown. Program profiles show the source for each fact and the date it was last verified (current range 2026-10-12 to 2026-10-12). The directory currently shows 1,827 verified fact groups across its programs.

CACREP directory

Program accreditation by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) comes from CACREP's own directory of accredited programs (downloaded 12 October 2026): institution, specialty, degree, status, accreditation dates and whether CACREP lists the program as online. Each directory row is matched to a listed program by specialty, degree level, degree abbreviation and campus. When a university page claims CACREP accreditation that the directory does not show, the claim is not published and an editor reviews it. CACREP accreditation is program-specific: a university's school counseling program can be accredited while its addiction counseling program is not.

IPEDS (U.S. Department of Education)

Official institution names, addresses, control (public or private) and the counts of counseling degrees awarded (2023–24 completions under CIP 13.1101, 13.1102, 51.1501, 51.1508, 51.2310 and 42.2803) come from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), published by the National Center for Education Statistics. IPEDS counts were also used to find candidate schools; a school is listed only after its programs are verified on its own pages.

DAPIP

Institutional accreditation comes from the Department of Education's Database of Accredited Postsecondary Institutions and Programs (DAPIP): accreditor, status and record. Institutional accreditation is not a ranking and is not the same as CACREP program accreditation.

Logos and campus photographs

School logos and campus photographs come from Wikimedia Commons through Wikidata, matched by the school's IPEDS identifier (never by name). Each image keeps its author, license and source, listed on the image credits page. A campus photograph appears only with the school it depicts; where no suitable image exists, a neutral placeholder is shown.

Licensure information

Licensure and certification statements — including state-by-state tables of whether a program meets, does not meet, or has not determined that it meets educational requirements — are shown exactly as the university publishes them, with their date. We do not determine licensure eligibility ourselves. State licensing boards set and change requirements; confirm with the board in the state where you plan to practice.

What we do not use

Other directories, ranking sites, lead-generation sites, forums, Wikipedia or news articles are never used as sources for program facts. Pages behind bot protection are not bypassed; the gap is recorded instead.

Freshness and corrections

Tuition and deadlines are tied to their academic year and intake. Records whose deadlines have passed or whose tuition year has ended are flagged for re-verification; old dates are never rolled forward. If you find an error, suggest an update with an official source.