Methodology

How directory data and scores work

GetRecruited's directory and reports are built from federal athletics and education datasets, then normalized into program and school profiles that can be compared across sport, gender, division, state, and conference.

Each program is scored against its true peers — the same sport, gender, and division — so the figures you see are relative to like programs rather than the field as a whole.

Data sources

EADA athletics reporting

Program-level athletics finance and roster data comes from federal EADA reporting. That is the source for fields such as operating expenses, total revenue, and roster size.

IPEDS and College Scorecard

School-level outcomes and affordability data come from IPEDS and College Scorecard. That includes average net price, retention rate, graduation rate, acceptance rate, Pell rate, and median earnings.

GetRecruited directory joins

Those federal datasets are joined with school, sport, conference, division, state, and URL metadata so pages link directly into program and school profiles.

How percentile scores work

Investment, affordability, and academic scores are percentile-based relative measures, not raw grades pulled from a source dataset. A program is compared against peers in the same sport and gender so that a soccer program is not benchmarked against football or volleyball.

The scoring pipeline first percentile-ranks the underlying inputs, combines those normalized inputs into a composite, then percentile-ranks the composite again within the relevant comparison set. Letter grades are derived from those final percentiles.

90th percentile and above

70th to 89th percentile

40th to 69th percentile

10th to 39th percentile

Below 10th percentile

Metric definitions

Metric

What it means

Source

Net price

Average price students actually pay after grant and scholarship aid, used as the core cost lens.

College Scorecard / IPEDS

Median earnings

Median post-attendance earnings at the school level, used as an outcome lens.

College Scorecard

Graduation rate

Share of students who complete their degree, used as a school-level academic outcome signal.

IPEDS / College Scorecard

Acceptance rate

Admissions selectivity at the school level. Lower acceptance rates are treated as more selective. Used as a core input to the academic score.

IPEDS / College Scorecard

Operating expenses

Program operating expenses reported for running the team day to day.

EADA

Total revenue

Revenue the program reports generating through athletics operations.

EADA

Investment score

Percentile-based score summarizing athlete-resource signals: total revenue and operating expenses, ranked relative to sport-and-gender peers.

Derived from EADA program fields

Affordability score

Percentile-based score combining average net price (inverted) and Pell grant rate, ranked relative to sport-and-gender peers.

Derived from school cost and Pell-access fields

Academic score

Percentile-based score combining acceptance rate (inverted, lower = better), graduation rate, and median post-grad earnings, all ranked relative to sport-and-gender peers.

Derived from school outcome fields

Refresh cadence and limitations

Directory data is rebuilt on a regular cadence. When a page says “Data last updated,” that refers to the timestamp of the current underlying data build rather than the deploy date.

Reported aid, revenue, expenses, and outcomes are directional and should be used as comparison inputs rather than guarantees. School-level academic and affordability fields describe the institution as a whole, not just one team. Program-level athletics finance data is also dependent on institutional reporting quality.

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