Universities — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a university — a feature tagged `amenity=university` in OpenStreetMap. 51,662 of them worldwide, drawn as a coloured dot sized by footprint area and coloured by who operates it, where that has been recorded. At the closest zooms the dot is joined by the campus's mapped outline, where one has been drawn.

Click any university to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — its sector, and the body that runs it where a mapper recorded that. Where the university has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every university links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

Colleges and schools have their own layers, and places of education shows every level together.

Mapped, not modelled

Each university is an object a mapper drew, from survey, local knowledge or aerial imagery; nothing here is modelled or estimated. The limitation is therefore completeness, not resolution: an unmapped university is absent, and on this map absence looks identical to empty ground.

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 point here, so a large multi-site university may appear several times. Faculty buildings inside a campus outline are not counted separately: a point drawn inside its own institution's outline is merged into it. Sites that are genuinely separate places stay separate, which is the honest answer for a university spread across a city.

Colour, and how much of it there is

Colour shows who operates the university — and only about one in twelve says. The rest are drawn in grey.

Not recorded — 91.7% of universities
Publicly operated — 5.1%
Privately operated — 2.8%
Religious — 0.2%

Grey is a real, named category on this map. It says nobody has recorded who runs that university, not that the university is unusual. The recorded tenth also skews: countries whose university lists were imported into OpenStreetMap in bulk are much better tagged than countries whose were mapped one at a time.

"Privately operated" does not mean "charges fees". OpenStreetMap's tag says the operator is a non-government body — a company, a trust, a foundation. Plenty of such universities are publicly funded, and plenty of public ones charge substantial fees. The legend says "operated" throughout for that reason, and the schools layer leaves the tag out altogether, because for schools the gap between the two meanings is wide enough to mislead about real named places.

Size

Each symbol is sized by footprint area — the ground the mapped outline covers, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to footprint (radius to its square root), so a campus four times the area draws twice as wide. Universities have the largest footprints of any layer built from these tags: the great land-grant campuses run to more than 20 km².

Some universities are mapped as a single point, with no outline and so no footprint. Rather than draw them at the smallest size, they are given a nominal, typical size a little below the median footprint.

Footprint is land, not reputation, endowment or student numbers. The largest features on this map are the universities with the most ground — often agricultural and research campuses — not the most eminent ones.

Completeness

OpenStreetMap is not equally complete everywhere. Coverage is strongest in Western and Central Europe and other well-mapped regions, and thinner in low- and middle-income countries. An absent university means "not yet mapped", not "does not exist".

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. There is no year control, and a university merged or renamed long ago may still be mapped as it was until a mapper updates it.