Warning
The undergraduate program dataset remains the primary research object. This ecosystem dashboard is preliminary and exploratory: it tracks centers, institutes, initiatives, fellowships, and extracurricular programs mainly to understand how undergraduate programs emerge, change, and relate to nearby institutional infrastructure. Spreadsheet rows are intake leads, not canonical evidence, until verified against official institutional sources.
Note
Use this page to separate two questions. The undergraduate dashboard asks what students can major, minor, or earn credit in. This page asks whether the institution has adjacent PPE, political economy, civic thought, democracy, public service, or civic engagement infrastructure that may shape the path from center to curriculum, curriculum to center, or both.
Snapshot
128
Ecosystem records
128
Official-source records
0
Spreadsheet intake rows
34
States represented
72
Linked to curriculum institution
Geography
Record Mix
This table combines two verified sources. Verified ecosystem entity JSON records are dedicated center, institute, lab, initiative, and public-facing infrastructure records collected through the ecosystem JSON workflow. Verified canonical program/context records come from the undergraduate program registry: majors, minors, certificates, fellowships, and future/context credentials that help explain the surrounding ecosystem but are not themselves standalone ecosystem entities. External imports are intake leads from Ari’s spreadsheet and remain provisional until they are checked against official institutional sources.
| Source status | Ecosystem type | Records |
|---|---|---|
| Verified canonical program/context record | Future or context credential | 19 |
| Verified canonical program/context record | Center | 5 |
| Verified canonical program/context record | Initiative | 2 |
| Verified canonical program/context record | Program or initiative | 2 |
| Verified canonical program/context record | Fellowship | 1 |
| Verified canonical program/context record | Institute | 1 |
| Verified canonical program/context record | Lab | 1 |
| Verified canonical program/context record | Workshop | 1 |
| Verified ecosystem entity JSON | Center | 57 |
| Verified ecosystem entity JSON | Initiative | 20 |
| Verified ecosystem entity JSON | Institute | 9 |
| Verified ecosystem entity JSON | Program or initiative | 7 |
| Verified ecosystem entity JSON | Future or context credential | 2 |
| Verified ecosystem entity JSON | Lab | 1 |
Domain
| Domain | Curriculum link | Records |
|---|---|---|
| Adjacent | No linked undergraduate program yet | 3 |
| Adjacent | Linked undergraduate program | 1 |
| Civic leadership | Linked undergraduate program | 41 |
| Civic leadership | No linked undergraduate program yet | 39 |
| Civics / democracy | Linked undergraduate program | 22 |
| Civics / democracy | No linked undergraduate program yet | 12 |
| PPE | Linked undergraduate program | 5 |
| PPE | No linked undergraduate program yet | 1 |
| Political economy | Linked undergraduate program | 3 |
| Political economy | No linked undergraduate program yet | 1 |
Collection Plan
The discovery problem is different from undergraduate program discovery. Majors, minors, and certificates usually appear in catalogs; centers and initiatives are distributed across academic units, public-service offices, donor-funded schools, student-life offices, and institute pages. A good process should therefore begin with the universe of US higher education institutions, use structured search to triage candidates, and then promote only official-source confirmations into the JSON-first dataset.
| Step | Purpose | Output |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Keep the undergraduate program registry as the anchor | Centers and extracurricular initiatives are tracked because they help explain the trajectory of undergraduate programs, not because this page is yet a complete census. | Every ecosystem record should link back to a curriculum institution when a major, minor, certificate, or related undergraduate program exists. |
| 2. Build JSON-first center records | Use official center, institute, school, program, and university pages to collect existence, scope, institutional location, and relationship to curriculum. | A separate center/initiative JSON schema with fields for entity type, domain, official URL, relationship to curriculum, launch/status, and evidence notes. |
| 3. Start from all US higher education institutions | Avoid relying only on known networks, spreadsheets, or prominent R1 examples. | A national triage queue keyed by IPEDS unitid and institution name. |
| 4. Triage with structured web search | Search institution-by-institution for terms such as PPE center, political economy center, civic thought, civic leadership, democracy institute, constitutional studies, public service, deliberation, and civic engagement. | Candidate records tagged as likely match, possible match, false positive, or needs human review. |
| 5. Verify only from official sources | External spreadsheets, Airtable lists, and web search results should identify candidates, not establish canonical records. | Canonical ecosystem records only after official-source review. |
| 6. Track institutional evolution over time | The key research value is seeing how centers, institutes, initiatives, and undergraduate programs develop in relation to one another. | Longitudinal notes for cases where a center or institute becomes a school, department, major, minor, or certificate. |