The rules this project publishes under.

Sources are preferred in this order: statutes and regulations; court decisions; official agency manuals, directives, forms, and policy memoranda; official systemwide higher-education policies; official campus or county materials; government audits and oversight reports; official datasets; peer-reviewed research; reputable nonprofit or academic analysis; news reporting for context; community reports, clearly labeled. Search-result snippets are never treated as evidence.

For important claims the Observatory locates the underlying source, verifies it is current, records the issuer and date, checks whether later authority superseded it, cross-references a second authoritative source when one should reasonably exist, preserves exact terminology, distinguishes explicit text from inference, and documents unresolved contradictions instead of silently resolving them.

• Confirmed by statute or regulation
• Confirmed by current agency guidance
• Confirmed by systemwide guidance
• Campus-reported practice
• County-reported practice
• Secondary-source context
• Conflicting official sources
• Not publicly verified
• Historical and no longer current

Every quantitative publication states its numerator, denominator, unit of analysis, time period, missing data, partial periods, exclusions, deduplication method, and rounding method, and says whether values represent people, claims, awards, enrollments, institutions, or transactions, whether results are descriptive or adjusted, and whether differences are relative percentages or percentage points. Calculations run on unrounded values and are independently validated. Descriptive data never gets causal language, and a difference is never described as an individual student's probability without an appropriate model.

Claims are not people. Beneficiaries are not all student veterans. Veterans are not all military-connected students. Academic years are not fiscal or calendar years. Institution-level and system-level denominators do not mix. Grants are not completed applications. Enrollment is not unique students. Federal and state benefit users are not combined without documenting overlap.

Every report displays one of: independent analysis, not peer reviewed; externally reviewed for factual accuracy; methodologically peer reviewed; formally peer reviewed. Agency response status displays alongside it. Peer review or institutional endorsement is never implied where it did not occur. Before a consequential factual finding about a specific institution publishes, that institution can receive a neutral factual-review request with a response date; factual review does not give the reviewing institution editorial control and does not constitute endorsement.

Every source-dependent record carries its source, issuer, dates, retrieval date, last verified date, and change history. Records whose primary source no longer supports the displayed statement get flagged and corrected, not quietly edited. The sitewide standard lives at the desk's data methodology page.