HeronHex-HigherEd

Ask about any U.S. college or university and get answers built only from free public sources, each one named and dated. Twenty-nine read-only tools cover five areas. Institutions: find a college by name or identifier, its profile, fall enrollment trends, retention, IPEDS finances, peers and side-by-side comparisons (IPEDS via the Urban Institute, NCES, College Scorecard). Risk: Heightened Cash Monitoring status, financial responsibility composite scores, cohort default rates (Federal Student Aid) and Single Audit findings with their text (Federal Audit Clearinghouse). Accreditation: who accredits an institution or program and the dated actions an agency has recorded (U.S. Department of Education DAPIP). Funding: research spending (NSF HERD), NSF and NIH awards, open Grants.gov opportunities, state higher-education funding (SHEEO) and projected high school graduates by state (WICHE). Labor market: wages by state or metropolitan area and national and state projections (BLS, Projections Central), occupation skills (O*NET), the program-to-occupation crosswalk, and College Scorecard program awards and earnings.

What makes it trustworthy: every response carries its source, the period it covers and when it was retrieved; missing data comes back as an explicit null with the reason, never an estimate; identifier matches are exact and name matches are labeled as fuzzy and never guessed when ambiguous; upstream names and narratives are returned as data and flagged as untrusted. The tools report what the record says and do not score, rank or give verdicts.

No sign-in and nothing to install. The server keeps no record of what anyone asks: no access log, no accounts, a cache of public data files only. Open source (MIT) from Heron & Hex Solutions; the same code runs locally as a Claude Code plugin if you prefer. Not an Anthropic product, provided without warranty, and not a substitute for the primary source on anything consequential.