Core Sources
School Profiles
The module is built from school-profile pages and mirrored PDF school-profile documents.
Schools
About The Schools Module
The Schools module mirrors school-profile documents, normalizes school facts into canonical metrics, and links schools to related nonprofit financial records where identity can be resolved.
Ranking Model
Proprietary
Public rank now comes from platform-owned metrics, not the seed-list source.
Primary Entities
Schools
Each school has one canonical record plus year-specific profile rows for future historical comparisons.
Use Case
Compare
Normalized fields support school compare pages, filters, graphs, and future time-series views.
What The Schools Module Covers
The Schools module focuses on private high schools and the school-profile materials they publish for college counseling and admissions audiences.
It stores the original source documents, mirrors them locally, and then converts the source material into canonical metrics that can be compared across schools.
How Normalization Works
The module does not stop at loose fact extraction. It normalizes fields like enrollment splits, admissions funnels, testing figures, and school-type values into typed metrics stored per profile PDF.
That structure is what makes compare pages, future graphs, filtering, and multi-year backfills possible.
How Ranking Works
The current public ranking is a platform-owned methodology built from normalized school data rather than the original seed-list ordering.
Version one weights college-outcomes prominence, admissions selectivity, and student/teacher ratio. The exact method is documented in the domain ranking note.
- College outcomes prominence: 45%
- Admissions selectivity: 35%
- Student/teacher ratio: 20%
Cross-Domain Linking
Where a school can be matched to a nonprofit EIN, the school page can show nonprofit financial highlights such as net assets, net income, and expenses per student.
That keeps the school page concise while linking deeper financial detail to the nonprofit module.
FAQ
Does the Schools module still use Niche rankings?
No. Niche is only used as a seed source for the initial school corpus. The public ranking is now computed by the platform from normalized school metrics.
Why mirror the original school-profile PDF?
The mirrored source keeps provenance intact, allows reprocessing when the normalization improves, and prevents the public page from depending on a fragile remote PDF link.
Can the Schools module compare schools directly?
Yes. School compare pages use the same canonical metrics that power the school detail pages, so the comparison stays objective and database-driven.
Will schools support time-series views later?
Yes. The schema is designed around profile-year rows so older PDFs can be backfilled and metrics like enrollment or admit rate can be graphed over time.