specification: API Commons Conformance
specificationVersion: '0.1'
provider: Federal Student Aid
providerId: federal-student-aid
generated: '2026-09-09'
method: probed
source: https://api.data.gov/ed/collegescorecard/v1/schools
docs: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/api-documentation/
modified: '2026-09-09'
description: >-
  Standards conformance for the College Scorecard API, the one publicly callable
  surface on this Federal Student Aid record. Cross-cutting web-API standards are
  largely absent — there is no OAuth, no RFC 9457, no OpenAPI. What is present, and
  is the substantive finding here, is domain-standard conformance: the API's
  identifiers are the federal higher-education identifier schemes, verified by live
  probe rather than claimed in prose, so anyone who already speaks IPEDS, OPE ID or
  CIP joins this data with no bespoke crosswalk.
conformance:
  - id: oauth2
    conforms: false
    evidence: >-
      No OAuth surface. Authentication is a single api.data.gov API key —
      https://api.data.gov/docs/developer-manual/
  - id: oidc
    conforms: false
    evidence: >-
      No /.well-known/openid-configuration on any host; 54 well-known probes on
      2026-09-09 returned no documents. See well-known/federal-student-aid-well-known.yml
  - id: rfc9457
    conforms: false
    evidence: >-
      Errors are application/json with a bespoke {"error":{"code","message"}}
      envelope, not application/problem+json. See errors/federal-student-aid-problem-types.yml
  - id: openapi
    conforms: false
    evidence: >-
      No OpenAPI, Swagger or other machine-readable contract published. Probed
      /openapi.json, /swagger.json and /api-docs on studentaid.gov and api.data.gov
      on 2026-09-09 — all 404 or HTML shells.
  - id: pagination
    conforms: true
    evidence: >-
      Documented page/per_page parameters with metadata.total, metadata.page and
      metadata.per_page in every response —
      https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/api-documentation/
  - id: idempotency
    conforms: false
    applicability: na
    evidence: >-
      Read-only GET surface; no mutating operation exists to protect. See
      conventions/federal-student-aid-conventions.yml
  - id: rate-limit-headers
    conforms: partial
    evidence: >-
      X-RateLimit-Limit and X-RateLimit-Remaining observed live 2026-09-09; the
      RFC 9239-style RateLimit-Policy and a Retry-After on 429 are both absent.
  - id: https-only
    conforms: true
    evidence: >-
      api.data.gov rejects plaintext with HTTPS_REQUIRED (HTTP 400) —
      https://api.data.gov/docs/developer-manual/
  - id: json-api
    conforms: false
    evidence: Bespoke metadata/results envelope, not the JSON:API media type.
  - id: odata
    conforms: false
    evidence: Bespoke __not/__range query grammar, not OData $filter.
domain_standards:
  - id: ipeds-unitid
    name: IPEDS UNITID
    body: National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), U.S. Department of Education
    conforms: true
    role: primary record identifier
    evidence: >-
      The API's primary key field `id` is the institution's IPEDS UNITID, and the
      nested field-of-study objects carry the same value as `unit_id`. Probed
      2026-09-09: GET /ed/collegescorecard/v1/schools?school.name=Harvard University
      returned {"id":166027,...} — 166027 is Harvard University's IPEDS UNITID.
    why_it_matters: >-
      Any consumer already holding IPEDS data joins to College Scorecard on a shared
      key with no mapping table.
  - id: ope-id
    name: OPE ID (Office of Postsecondary Education Identifier)
    body: U.S. Department of Education / Federal Student Aid
    conforms: true
    role: Title IV program participation identifier
    evidence: >-
      Fields `ope6_id` and `ope8_id` returned live on 2026-09-09 for UNITID 166027
      as "002155" and "00215500" respectively.
    why_it_matters: >-
      OPE ID is the identifier Federal Student Aid itself issues to institutions
      eligible for Title IV aid. It is the join key between this open dataset and
      FSA's own program data, including the aid volume files published on the FSA
      Data Center.
  - id: cip
    name: CIP (Classification of Instructional Programs)
    version: 4-digit series
    body: National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
    conforms: true
    role: field-of-study taxonomy
    evidence: >-
      Field-of-study records are keyed on `code` in the CIP 4-digit series, probed
      live 2026-09-09 (e.g. code "0107", title "International Agriculture.").
    why_it_matters: >-
      Program-level outcomes are addressable by the same taxonomy used across federal
      education statistics and by accreditors.
domain_standards_absent:
  - id: ed-fi
    checked: true
    found: false
    note: No Ed-Fi data standard surface; Ed-Fi is a K-12/SIS standard and does not apply to this dataset.
  - id: lti
    checked: true
    found: false
    note: No learning-tool interoperability surface; this is a statistics API, not a learning platform.
  - id: oneroster
    checked: true
    found: false
  - id: oai-pmh
    checked: true
    found: false
    note: >-
      No OAI-PMH verb endpoint on collegescorecard.ed.gov. The Department's separate
      open-data platform at data.ed.gov runs CKAN and does expose a CKAN action API
      (probed 2026-09-09, /api/3/action/status_show returned 200), but that is a
      Department-wide platform, not a Federal Student Aid surface.
certifications: []
certifications_note: >-
  No SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI or FedRAMP authorization is published for these public
  surfaces. As federal government systems they are governed by FISMA and the
  Department's ATO process, which is not published as a certification artifact, so
  no Compliance pointer is wired.