About College Score

Succeeding in college is about more than rankings, tuition, or test scores. For many students, it's about feeling safe, supported, and included.

Yet information about accessibility, disability support, safety, cultural climate, and inclusion is often hard to find–or filtered through institutional promises rather than students' lived experience.

College Score exists to change that.

We are a student-powered platform where current and former disabled students share their experiences attending their college so that students and prospective students can make informed, confident decisions.

Students are not defined by a single identity. College Score is intentionally intersectional, allowing students to share how overlapping identities–such as race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic background–shape their disability experiences.

As one student told us:

" Even though the accessibility and academics were perfect, the cultural fit wasn't safe."

Those distinctions matter, and students deserve tools that reflect them.

Most college search tools rely on schools describing themselves. While that information is important, it shouldn't be where the story ends.

College Score centers disabled student experiences.

• We focus on accessibility, inclusion, and safety.
• We recognize that students hold multiple, intersecting identities.
• We pair numerical ratings with open, written reflections.
• We complement–not replace–institutional data like the CeDaR database.

This approach reflects how students already evaluate colleges: through stories, shared experiences, and word-of-mouth.

College Score began as a capstone project at the University of Washington, shaped in collaboration with students and faculty with disabilities and accessibility advocates from the Center for Research and Education in Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE.uw.edu).

Through that work, we learned how limited existing college search tools are when it comes to accessibility, inclusion, and lived experience–and how heavily students rely on word-of-mouth to fill those gaps.

Today, College Score is an open-source project. Want to contribute? Join Us.