How we categorize US universities

The four tabs

4-Year Universities 1,307

Bachelor's-granting institutions, split into three tiers via the sub-pills above the catalog grid. Schools that read as drastically different to an international family no longer share a single bucket here:

• National Research — Carnegie R1/R2 doctoral universities. The Berkeley/Michigan/UNC/UT-Austin tier; what international parents and employers think of when they hear “American university.”
• Regional Universities — master's-granting, non-doctoral. Often strong undergraduate teaching (Cal Poly, James Madison) but limited research output and lighter international name recognition.
• 4-Year Colleges — bachelor's-only institutions that aren't small private liberal arts colleges. State-university branch campuses (Ohio State-Marion, Penn State branches) and small private religious colleges live here.

We don't use the US News “National vs Regional” line — that's a magazine-classification artifact. We use Carnegie research activity (R1/R2) and IPEDS highest-degree- offered, both authoritative federal taxonomies.

Liberal Arts Colleges 371

Standalone undergraduate-focused colleges classified by Carnegie as Baccalaureate Colleges (Arts & Sciences). Distinct from 4-Year Universities because the experience — small classes, no graduate students teaching undergrads, residential focus — is structurally different and intl families specifically ask about it.

Community Colleges 583

Two-year associate-degree institutions — the classic transfer-out pathway. Pay less, start the F-1 clock, then transfer to a 4-Year for the diploma that recruiters recognise. We previously folded small 4-year regional colleges in here too, but those grant bachelor's degrees and belong with universities; they now sit under the 4-Year tab's “4-Year Colleges” sub-pill.

Specialty Schools 383

Schools built around a single discipline — art & design, music conservatories, health-sciences institutes, seminaries, US service academies, vocational/technical schools, tribal colleges, and online-only programs. Most of these don't admit international undergraduates at scale; the sub-pills inside this tab let you filter to the ones that do. Engineering-focused schools like MIT, Caltech, and Georgia Tech live in the 4-Year Universities tab — they read as national universities to recruiters and aren't treated as a separate bucket here.

Where the categories come from

Primary source: Carnegie Basic Classification (2021) — the standard taxonomy used by US higher-ed researchers and policy orgs since 1973. Secondary inputs: IPEDS institution_size for edge cases where Carnegie was ambiguous, and US News categorization for the National-vs-Regional split (which we then collapsed).

Edge cases we made calls on

• US service academies (West Point, USNA, USAFA, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine) sit in the Specialty tab under a dimmed Military sub-pill. They're not hidden — international applicants should know they exist — but they're visually de-emphasized because the four DoD academies require US citizenship for cadets/midshipmen.
• Cooper Union, Olin College of Engineering, Harvey Mudd sit awkwardly between Specialty and LAC. We left Carnegie's classification intact rather than re-categorize editorially — but they show up via search regardless of the active tab.
• Schools with NULL or unknown institution_category fall into Specialty so nothing disappears from the catalog. Most of these are unaccredited or recently-closed institutions we're keeping for historical search.

What's not in MyUni

• Online-only programs (no residential intl undergrad pathway).
• K-12 prep schools that mistakenly appear in some IPEDS exports.
• For-profit institutions that have closed since 2020.