Methodology
How we tier
A tier is a summary of how much weight a program is likely to carry in an admissions read — nothing more. This page sets out exactly which factors feed that judgement, how they are weighted, who applies them, and how often each record is looked at again. If you disagree with a specific tier, the reasoning on the card is the thing to argue with.
The weighted factors
Each program is scored on the six factors below. Weights are indicative rather than arithmetic to three decimal places: they describe how much a factor can move a record between tiers.
- 30%
Selectivity you can evidence
Published acceptance rate, cohort size against applicant volume, or a documented national/regional shortlisting stage. Where a program publishes nothing, we record it as unverified rather than estimating.
- 25%
Merit selection vs. ability to pay
Can a seat be purchased? Free or fully funded, merit-selected programs score highest; open-enrolment paid programs score lowest regardless of the host institution's name.
- 15%
Mentor and faculty involvement
Named faculty or working researchers supervising real output outrank lecture-and-certificate formats delivered by rotating instructors.
- 15%
Output a reader can inspect
A paper, dataset, prototype, placement, or competition result — something an admissions reader can look at — counts more than attendance alone.
- 10%
Reach and recognition
National or international reach, and whether the name is routinely recognised by admissions readers, versus a regional or single-school program.
- 5%
Track record and continuity
How many cycles the program has run, whether alumni outcomes are documented publicly, and whether the format has stayed stable.
What each tier means
- S
- Recognized on sight. Free or near-free, merit-selected, typically under 10% acceptance.
- A
- Genuine merit-based output — the signal is what you produced or won, not attendance.
- B
- Solid and genuinely selective, but not yet a name an admissions reader recognises on sight.
- C
- Pay-to-attend, limited marginal admissions value. Can still be worth it for the learning — just not a differentiator on its own.
A lower tier is not a judgement on the people who run a program or the students who attend it. Plenty of C-tier courses teach well and are enjoyable; the tier only says the program is unlikely to be the part of an application that changes a decision.
Who assigns the tier, and how often it is re-reviewed
Who: tiers are assigned by the AscentPath editorial review — a two-person pass in which one reviewer drafts the tier against the factors above and cites the source pages, and a second reviewer signs it off or sends it back. No program pays to be listed, to be re-tiered, or to be promoted, and no listing is sponsored.
Sources: the program's own eligibility, selection and funding pages; published cohort or acceptance figures where they exist; and public sector research on how admissions offices weigh these activities — notably the NACAC State of College Admission research, which is where the figure of fewer than 9% of admissions officers rating paid pre-college programs as of considerable importance comes from. Each record links to the source page it was built from.
Cadence: automated link-health checks run every six hours and a discovery pass runs daily. Editorial re-review of the tier and eligibility text happens at least every 90 days, and always when a program's own page changes. Any record we have not confirmed in 30 days is flagged on its card so you can see the age of the claim rather than trusting it blindly.
Corrections: if you run a program or spot an error, tell us and we will re-review the record and update the reviewed date. We would rather carry a corrected record than a confident wrong one.