Advertising Disclosure
How We Make Money
As part of our mission here at STEPS (Student Training & Education in Public Service) to provide the most comprehensive and trustworthy public service education and career information, we want to be completely transparent about how we make money.
STEPS generates revenue by referring prospective students to partner colleges and universities through advertisements placed on our site. Advertisements are always clearly marked and can be easily identified by the nearby “Sponsored” text.
Advertisements appear on various pages as featured programs, as well as through our program search tool. When users click on a featured program advertisement, or request information from a partner school through our program search tool, we may receive compensation.
Revenue we generate through these avenues ensures our informational content can continue to be free for our valued readers.
Editorial Integrity and Independence
Compensation we receive from partner schools never influences our editorial content. These schools never receive preferential treatment in our school rankings, in-depth guidebooks, and any other information or resources published on our site.
- School rankings metrics are based on data provided by independent, trusted sources such as the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and CollegeScorecard from the U.S. Department of Education.
- Our team continually reviews our content and processes to ensure our editorial integrity is never compromised. Maintaining the trust of our readers is of the utmost importance to us, and we want to ensure that trust is never broken.