How Shortlist sources its data
Shortlist is a research publication. Every data point on the site — tuition, ratios, schedules, accreditations, teacher pay — traces back to a public source or a provider’s own statement. This page documents what gets included, where each field comes from, how often it’s refreshed, and what Shortlist deliberately doesn’t publish.
No sponsored placements. No paid favorability. The same sources, the same standards, applied equally to every provider.
Shortlist lists licensed childcare providers that operate in a covered metro area. A provider appears once it meets at least one of these conditions:
Even when a provider is in the database, it stays hidden from the public ledger until enough fields are populated to support an honest comparison — a published review, or at least five of seventeen tracked attributes (price, schedule, age range, ratio, location, and others). Stubs without enough information sit invisible by design.
Different fields come from different places. Shortlist follows a tiered source hierarchy — structured authoritative sources first, per-provider scraping only when nothing better exists.
Authoritative for licensing status, capacity, license number, inspection history, and state-administered quality ratings. One API call returns structured records for an entire state.
National chains have brand-level policies that apply across all locations. One verified fact — e.g., “all KinderCare locations provide meals” — fills dozens of provider records. Chain-level data is recorded with a chain-level source note so parents can see how it was inferred.
Used to verify provider claims, never as a discovery source. If a provider claims accreditation but the directory doesn’t list them, Shortlist flags the discrepancy for review — it doesn’t silently clear the claim. Directory lag, name mismatches, and incomplete public scraping are all real reasons a legitimate accreditation may not appear.
Published parent handbooks are the single richest per-provider source — ratios, meal policies, sick policies, diapering, outdoor and screen policies often appear in one document. When a handbook is found on a provider’s website, it’s prioritized over individual subpage scraping.
Programs, tuition, philosophy, and enrollment status are read from provider websites — homepage plus targeted subpages (/programs, /tuition, /enrollment, /about, /careers). Only explicit statements get committed. Vague language (“experienced staff,” “competitive ratios,” “contact us for pricing”) is not enough to fill a field.
Teacher pay is sourced exclusively from real job postings with explicit dollar amounts — Indeed listings, provider careers pages, and IRS Form 990 filings for nonprofit operators. Salary estimation models, metro-area averages, and review-site comp ratings are not used.
When automated sources are exhausted and gaps remain, Shortlist emails providers directly to ask for two or three specific missing fields. There’s a three-email lifetime cap per provider, weekday-only sends, and no follow-up after a non-response — outreach is the last lever, not the first.
Providers can claim their listing through the Shortlist provider dashboard and submit corrections or additions directly. Self-submitted data goes to a review queue, not straight to the public record — it’s reconciled against existing sources before being applied.
Where each public field comes from, in priority order. The first source listed is the one that fills most records; later sources backfill gaps.
| Field | Primary source |
|---|---|
| License status, license number, capacity | State licensing database |
| Inspection history | State licensing database |
| State quality rating | State QRIS (Early Achievers, Colorado Shines, NC Star, Texas Rising Star, ExceleRate) |
| Year established | State licensing date → ProPublica 990 ruling date → provider website → Wayback Machine first crawl |
| Accreditation (NAEYC, Montessori, Waldorf, NAIS, ISACS, Cognia) | Accrediting body directory; provider website is a claim, never a verification |
| Tuition (price low / price high) | Provider tuition page; state-published rates if available |
| Age range | Provider programs page |
| Schedule (hours per day, days per week) | Provider programs or enrollment page; both numeric values required |
| Meals | Parent handbook → FAQ → chain-level inference (Head Start, KinderCare, Bright Horizons, etc.) |
| Ratio (children per teacher) | Parent handbook or staff page, explicit only; state licensing minimums for some states |
| Enrollment status | Provider enrollment page, with a date stamp on every update |
| Teaching philosophy | Provider about or philosophy page, explicit statements only |
| Teacher pay | Indeed listings, provider careers pages, or IRS Form 990 filings — only real postings with explicit dollar amounts |
| Staff tenure | Named teacher bios with specific years of experience — never inferred from “experienced staff” |
| Location (latitude, longitude) | Geocoded from licensed address; both values required for visibility |
| Verified | Set when a provider claims their dashboard or replies to outreach — not an enrichment field |
Every populated field traces to one of the sources above. Shortlist does not fabricate values, and it does not infer fields from adjacent claims. If a provider you know well looks sparse, it usually means Shortlist is missing information, not that the program is poor — provider claims through the dashboard are the fastest fix.
Provider tuition is published in wildly different formats — weekly, monthly, annual, per-semester, hourly, in installments. To make providers comparable, every price is normalized to a monthly figure:
If days-per-week varies, the lowest option becomes price low and the highest becomes price high. If the timeframe of a published price is genuinely ambiguous after applying these rules, the price is flagged for human review and not auto-committed.
Co-op caveat. Co-op tuition reflects the dollar fee only. Required parent volunteer hours are a real cost — lost work time, schedule constraints — and Shortlist discloses the volunteer requirement separately rather than burying it in the headline price.
Different fields go stale at different rates. Shortlist refreshes on a per-field cadence rather than a uniform site-wide schedule.
| Field | Refresh interval |
|---|---|
| Enrollment status | 90 days — every record carries a date; status older than 90 days is treated as unknown |
| Pricing | 365 days — annual review |
| Licensing & inspection | 180 days — semi-annual pull from state portals |
| Teacher pay | 180 days — pay bands shift slowly; refreshed semi-annually from current postings |
| Accreditation | 365 days, with directory caches refreshed weekly |
| Closure detection | Daily — DNS, TLS, and licensing status are checked daily; persistent failures over three days remove the listing |
| Other fields | Refreshed opportunistically during enrichment runs and when providers self-submit updates |
The data on the site is a snapshot, not a live feed. State agencies publish on their own schedule, providers update their own pages on their own schedule, and Shortlist’s pulls happen on the cadence above. Before making any decision based on Shortlist data, parents should verify pricing, availability, and program details directly with the provider.
The shape of a methodology is also defined by what it leaves out. Shortlist makes the following deliberate choices:
Shortlist used to publish A/B/C/D letter grades as an overall quality summary. In April 2026, those grades were retired across the site. The reason: research on early childhood quality — particularly the von Suchodoletz et al. 2023 meta-analysis of 185 studies — finds that the structural factors a public site can measure (ratios, group size, teacher credentials, accreditation) are weak predictors of child outcomes. Treating any composite of those factors as a single “quality grade” overstates what the data can support. Shortlist now positions itself as a visit-narrowing tool that surfaces evidence; the judgment of fit belongs to the parent who tours.
No provider has paid for inclusion, a favorable review, or preferential placement. There are no sponsored slots, no featured tiers, no advertising of any kind. Listings exist because the provider operates in a covered area and meets licensing requirements.
Salary estimation models, metro-area pay averages, predicted ratios, inferred pricing — none of these are used to fill gaps. A null is more honest than a guess. When a field can’t be sourced, it stays null and the provider’s overall record reads as “information missing” rather than fabricated.
Editorial verdicts and written reviews are added only when Shortlist has done the research: read the website, verified accreditation claims, reviewed inspections, checked job postings, and where possible, talked to families. Most listings have no review — the data ledger speaks for them.
Shortlist uses first-party analytics to count page views and understand which features parents actually use. There are no third-party ad networks, no tracking pixels that share data with brokers, and no analytics products that monetize visitor data. See the privacy policy for details.
If something on the site looks wrong, email [email protected]. Corrections backed by a public source (a license record, a provider’s own website, an accreditation directory) move quickly. Providers can also claim their listing and submit edits through the provider dashboard; submissions go to a review queue and are reconciled against existing sources before being applied.
Last updated: May 8, 2026