Universities — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a university. There are more than 51,000 worldwide. Colour represents who operates it where somebody has recorded that, and the size of a dot represents the ground the campus covers. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as the body that runs it. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every university here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from aerial imagery. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any national list of universities.

What we include

We use one exact tag, `amenity=university`. Schools and colleges each have a map of their own.

One university, several dots

A university is often mapped as more than one object: a main campus, a medical school across the city, a science park on the edge of town. Each mapped area is a dot here, so a large university spread over several sites may appear several times.

Faculty buildings inside a campus outline are not counted separately, because we merge a point drawn inside its own institution's outline into that outline. Sites that are genuinely separate places stay separate, which is the honest answer for a university spread across a city.

Colour

Colour represents who operates the university, and only about one in twelve says. We draw the rest in grey. Of those that do record it, rather more are publicly operated than privately, and a very small number are religious.

Grey is a real category here. It says nobody has recorded who runs that university, not that the university is unusual. The recorded share is also uneven, because countries whose university lists were imported into OpenStreetMap in bulk are far better tagged than countries mapped one institution at a time.

Privately operated does not mean the university charges fees. The OpenStreetMap tag says a non-government body runs it, and plenty of such universities are publicly funded while plenty of public ones charge substantial fees. That is why the legend says "operated" throughout.

Size

The size of a dot represents the ground the campus covers in square metres. These are the largest features of any education map here, and the great land-grant campuses run to more than 20 km². Some universities are mapped as a single point with no outline, and we draw those at one nominal size rather than the smallest.

Size is land rather than reputation, endowment or student numbers. The largest dots are the universities with the most ground, which are often agricultural and research campuses, not the most eminent ones.

Where the map is empty

An absent university means nobody has mapped it, not that it isn't there. Coverage is strongest in western and central Europe and other well mapped regions, and thinner in poorer countries. A dense patch is a well mapped place first.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A university that merged or changed its name long ago may stay on the map as it was until a mapper updates it.

Source and licence

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