Editorial Policy

No payment from any school, network or advertiser can:

• change a cost, debt, earnings or completion figure we publish;
• remove a program from a data table, including one whose numbers are unflattering;
• alter the ordering of any list generated from federal data;
• secure a favourable description, or the removal of an unfavourable one;
• influence what we write in our guides or on our methodology page.

What compensation does affect is which programs we actively promote and where those promotions appear. That is disclosed in full on our advertiser disclosure, and beside the data tables themselves rather than only in the footer.

Every number on this site is drawn from a public federal dataset and links back to it. We do not accept figures supplied by schools, and we do not republish numbers from other education websites.

Our data components enforce this: a table or statistic cannot be published without a source attribution attached to it. That is a constraint in the code, not a habit we rely on remembering.

Where a federal source suppresses a figure — usually because too few students completed a program for the government to report it safely — we show a dash. We do not estimate, model, or substitute a number from elsewhere. Our methodology page sets out what the data cannot tell you, at length and against our own interest.

Where we order programs, the ordering is computed from a single stated federal metric and the metric is named on the page. There is no editorial judgement in the ranking itself, no weighting we have not disclosed, and no paid placement anywhere in it.

We do not publish “best of” lists based on reputation, on our own opinion, or on criteria we have not written down. If we cannot show you exactly how an order was produced, we do not publish the order.

We make no representation about what any individual will earn, whether they will be admitted, whether they will qualify for aid, or whether they will find work. We report what federal data says about people who completed a program in the past. That is a different thing, and we are careful to say so.

Data pages are generated from the federal pipeline. Editorial writing — the sections describing what work in a field is actually like — is written from direct industry experience and is attributed.

StudyCreative is published by Tapline Media LLC in Atlanta. The editorial sections are written by Robert March, the site’s editor, who has fifteen years in creative-industry education, most of them as an administrator, and who now publishes the figures that side of the industry does not lead with. Data pages carry no byline because no one wrote them: they are generated from the federal pipeline described on the methodology page, and the person who runs that pipeline is the same editor.

If a figure here is wrong, we fix it and we say that we did. We do not quietly amend. Report an error to hello@studycreative.org with the page and the figure.

Where the error came from the federal source rather than from us, we say that too, and we leave the correction visible rather than removing the record of it.

If we weaken any commitment on this page, the date at the top changes and the change is described here rather than made silently.