Everything we did in year one.
Atlas of Opportunity is a student-led Washington nonprofit corporation. We think an organization that asks students to trust its listings should be willing to show its own numbers. These figures are pulled live from the database each time this page loads — nothing here is hand-typed.
Figures current as of September 30, 2026.
The catalog
Every listing is checked against its official source before it goes live, and links are re-tested automatically. Our methodology explains what “verified” does and does not mean.
Students reached
The number that matters most: students leaving Atlas to go apply somewhere.
Maintenance, not just launch
Directories rot. Archiving a dead program is as much of the work as adding a live one, so we publish those numbers too. Details live in the quality report.
Money
- $0 spent on advertising. Every visitor arrived through search, a counselor, a classmate, or a link someone shared.
- $0 in revenue. Atlas does not sell placement, run ads, take affiliate commissions, or charge schools. Programs cannot pay to be listed, ranked, or removed.
- $0 in donations. Atlas is not a 501(c)(3) and does not solicit donations; nothing given to Atlas would be tax-deductible.
- Running costs are limited to a domain registration, hosting and database, and email forwarding — paid personally by the founder, with no outside funding.
What we got wrong
- Broken links got ahead of us. Automated checking now runs daily, but for a stretch listings pointed at pages that had moved. Anything failing repeatedly is archived rather than left to look live.
- Duplicates. Programs listed under slightly different organization names created near-identical entries. 41 have been merged.
- Geographic skew. Coverage is strongest where our sources are strongest, which is not the same as where students need it most.
- Not enough student voices yet. We can show that 10,929 clicks went out to programs, but not yet how many turned into acceptances. Telling us what happened is the single most useful thing a student can do for the next one.
Next year
Deeper coverage outside the Pacific Northwest, real outcome data from students who applied, and guides that answer the questions students actually send us. If something here looks wrong, say so — corrections are public.