How we build each page

HealthSchoolFacts has one page per accredited graduate health program in the US: physician assistant, dental, veterinary, physical therapy, pharmacy and occupational therapy. Each page puts the program's board exam results, accreditation, class size, cost, degrees conferred, field earnings and admission requirements side by side, every number with the file it came from and the year it describes.

Which programs are listed

A program is on the site because its accreditor lists it: ARC-PA for PA programs, CODA for dental schools (DDS and DMD), CAPTE for physical therapy (DPT), ACPE for pharmacy (PharmD) and ACOTE for occupational therapy (master's and doctoral levels). For veterinary schools the site reads the AAVMC member list for the United States, because the AVMA Council on Education list refuses our fetcher; AVMA is cited by link. A vet school's accreditation status is the status the school states on its own page (for example "accredited by the AVMA Council on Education"), quoted with the date it was read, with the AVMA list linked as the authority. Each list is saved with its fetch date. Each program is matched to its institution in the federal IPEDS directory by name, city and state; a match needs a clear winner, and names that are unclear are reviewed by hand or left unmatched rather than guessed.

Board exam pass rates

• PA (PANCE): each program's NCCPA report, which ARC-PA requires programs to post on their own sites. The site reads every NCCPA layout (the Exam Performance Summary Report with all takers and first-time takers, the first-time-takers-only version and the Five Year First Time Taker Summary Report), whether posted as a PDF or a Word file, and stores the first-time rate and the national first-time rate for each class year as printed. A report that prints a class year for several campuses is not split by guesswork; those years are left out. Image-only PDFs are not read.
• PA programs that post no NCCPA report: the rates the program states on its own page, labelled "program-reported" and never mixed with NCCPA rows. The ranked PANCE list uses NCCPA first-time rows only, for classes with at least 20 first-time takers.
• Veterinary (NAVLE): the rate each school posts on its own outcomes page, as AVMA requires, shown "as the school reports it" with the school's own label. Schools define the rate differently (first-time or all takers, class year or testing year), so a rate the school does not call first-time is never called first-time here, and NAVLE rates are listed A to Z rather than ranked. A two-year label such as "2024-25" or "2025/26" is shown exactly as printed and filed under its second year, the same rule for every exam.
• Pharmacy (NAPLEX): the NABP report "NAPLEX Passing Rates" by school and graduation year. NABP's own site refuses our fetcher, so the site reads the public copy of the same NABP report posted by Western University of Health Sciences, and names that copy and NABP's original address.
• Physical therapy (NPTE): the FSBPT two-year first-time pass rates by school.
• Dental (INBDE): results by school are not published by the Joint Commission on National Dental Examinations. Dental pages say so once and show no estimate.
• Occupational therapy (NBCOT) rates are added in a later data session.

Accreditation

PA, dental, PT, pharmacy and OT status is the status on the accreditor's list, with its fetch date. A veterinary school's status is the status the school states on its own page, quoted with the date it was read; the AVMA Council on Education list of accredited colleges is the authority and is linked from every vet page, because the list itself refuses our fetcher.

Federal data

Degrees conferred come from IPEDS completions by CIP code (newest release, including provisional data), counted for the whole institution. Earnings and debt come from the College Scorecard field of study file, which reports at the 4-digit CIP level: the page names the field (for example, "Allied Health Diagnostic, Intervention, and Treatment Professions") and the graduating cohorts. State wages come from BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics and are shown as context only, never compared with older cohorts' earnings.

Rules

• Every number shows its source and year. A number the source does not publish reads "Not published"; nothing is estimated and no AI fills a number.
• Program-page values (class size, cost, GPA, patient care hours, deadline) are copied from the program's own page, and the import checks that the quoted text is on the saved copy. Health care experience hours are kept apart from patient care hours. An ARC-PA attrition table printed as a fraction (0.20) is shown as a percent (20%) next to the entering and graduating counts it prints.
• A page for one campus of a multi-campus institution names the campus; degrees conferred and earnings are institution-wide federal figures and are labelled that way.
• The explanation on a program page is written only from its stored numbers. A code check refuses any number that does not match a stored field, and a second check refuses any comparison (higher, lower, rose, fell, best, largest) the numbers do not support.
• Files are fetched politely: robots.txt is obeyed, one request per second per host, an honest user agent. A refusal or bot check is recorded as blocked and never worked around.

Which pages search engines see

A program page is offered to search engines only when it has an accreditation status, at least 8 further program-specific facts, a board pass rate where the exam publishes one (PA, pharmacy, PT, vet), its own explanation of at least 150 words that passes both checks, and enough difference from every other program page. State pages need an intro and at least 3 such programs (dental and vet: 1, plus the nearest programs in other states); national tables and lists need an intro and at least 10 rows. These decisions are computed when the data is imported, and every other page stays visible with a noindex tag.

The site is not affiliated with any school, accreditor or testing body and does not rank programs or estimate admission chances.