ABOUT
We run the math the brochures don’t.
LE TEEN is an independent data publisher. We compute the college math nobody hands a 17-year-old — 30-year net present value for 3,392 U.S. institutions, the $1.24M swing between the best and worst majors, the out-of-state tuition penalty — from public data, every claim traceable to a named source.
What we publish
A portfolio of small, sharp, data-grounded tools for teenagers making five-figure decisions on brochure-grade information: the worth-it calculator, the rankings (worst-ROI majors, best value by state, the out-of-state tax), and per-major and per-college pages. The same numbers ship three ways — on the page, as a free keyless API, and as a downloadable open dataset.
Where the numbers come from
We don’t survey schools or invent statistics. Every figure is derived from three sources of truth:
- IPEDS (U.S. Department of Education) — cost of attendance and institutional data.
- FREOPP — program-level earnings and ROI research, with a BLS national-median fallback where program data is thin.
- BEA — regional price parities, so cost-of-living is real, not national-average.
The model, the discount rate, the time horizon, the fallbacks, and the published limitations all live on the methodology page. Nothing is a black box.
Open by default
The full dataset is public under CC BY 4.0 with a citable DOI, mirrored across the archives researchers actually use, so anyone can check our math or build on it:
Zenodo DOI · GitHub · Kaggle · Hugging Face
Cite us as LE TEEN and name the underlying source we name. That’s the whole deal: take the numbers, attribute them, hold us to them.
Independence
No school pays for placement. No affiliate links, no lead-gen, no sponsored rankings. The data decides the ranking, and the ranking doesn’t move for anyone. When a number is uncomfortable for an institution, that’s the point — the brochures already ran the flattering math.
Contact
Journalists, methodology questions, custom data pulls, and everything else route through the press page — the 30-second version, the spokesperson, and how to reach us.