Tl;DR: This repo hosts a spreadsheet of U.S. college and university coordinates. You can view and download it here.

Several months ago I was working on a project that required a list of Texas college and university coordinates. I couldn't find this data anywhere online, so I resorted to copy/pasting coordinates out of Google Maps. Not fun.

Turns out I didn't need to do that.

The U.S. Department of Education keeps tabs on the coordinates of every college and university in the country through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). I found the data in the College Scorecard dataset the DOE also maintains. It's a beast of a dataset weighing in at 221.2 MB. It's probably too large for the average journalist just trying to get coordinates for a story. A cursory web search turned up no results when I saught a slimmed down version of the data — so I made one myself.

I pulled the data on March 16, 2023. 6,681 colleges and universities are included in the dataset — both public and private.

You can find the data in the output folder. You can also view it first in the flatgithub viewer here.

If this data helps you out with a project, please let me know! I'd love to hear about it. Reach out to me on social media.

How to replicate

If you'd like to run the code yourself (maybe there's more recent data that's come out), use the following steps:

1. Clone the repo.
2. Install the requirements with pip install -r requirements.txt.
3. You can either run the jupyter notebook or use the nbexec get-coordinates.ipynb to run it as a script.