Commercial use

This page sets the access boundary for the Higher-Ed A/G Research Extension. The intent is conservative: public, informational, research-oriented use is welcome; commercial reuse of the derived presentation, scoring artifacts, compiled documentation, and research outputs requires permission.

1. Public access

This site is offered for informational, research-oriented, non-commercial reading. Anyone may read the public pages, the document summaries under docs/, and the JSON data assets that summarise headline numbers. No registration is required.

The underlying IPEDS / NCES source data remains public and is governed by its own federal terms of use. This site does not republish raw IPEDS files.

2. Commercial use requires permission

Commercial reuse of this site’s derived materials — the presentation, the per-document summaries, the JSON validation summaries, the compiled documentation, and any scoring artifacts — requires written permission. This includes:

Redistribution as part of a commercial product, dataset, or report.
Bulk extraction or scraping of the public pages or JSON assets for downstream commercial use.
Integration into an institutional workflow used for client-facing decisions.
Client-facing use in advisory or consulting work that resells these materials or their conclusions.
Recurring monitoring, alerting, or watchlist services built on top of the materials.
Custom scoring or reporting derived from the framework for paid use.
Any advisory workflow that recommends decisions based on these materials.

3. Not offered as

This work is not offered as a college closure prediction service, an accreditation tool, an admissions tool, investment advice, a credit rating, an automated decision system, a production risk model, or a replacement for institutional review. Treat it as a research artifact with a narrow validated lane.

4. Inquiry process

If you would like to discuss permitted use, please include in your message:

Your name and the organisation you represent.
The intended use (description, audience, recurrence).
The access being requested (specific pages, JSON assets, document summaries).
The outputs of interest (numbers, framings, document text).
A point of contact for follow-up.

Contact: ag.bank.scoreboard@gmail.com

5. What stays public

Public IPEDS / NCES source data remains public; the federal data is what it always was. This site’s contribution is a derived presentation built on top of that data, plus the validation and documentation artifacts produced by the project. Those derived materials are what the commercial-use boundary above governs.