Methodology
Every number on this site traces back to a documented audit. Here is exactly what we counted, how we verified it, and where the edges are.
Global University AI Policy Audit 2026
Audit date: 2026-10-14. A snapshot, not a live registry.
What counted as a policy
YES means a page on the university's own official domain containing guidance or policy on AI use — for students, teaching, research, or the whole community. Generic academic-integrity pages that never mention AI do not count.
NO means we searched in English (plus the local language for non-English countries) and found no such page. UNCLEAR means we could not verify — dead links, portal-gated intranets, crawler-blocked domains, or insufficient evidence either way. UNCLEAR is not "confirmed absent"; true adoption is likely higher than the headline 77%.
How each record was verified
Web search plus direct verification: each policy URL was opened and confirmed to load AI guidance on 2026-10-14, or corroborated by search-engine crawl of the official page plus the MDPI April 2026 systematic audit of top-200 universities' GenAI guidelines where direct fetch failed. Searches ran in English plus German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Indonesian, Thai and Vietnamese — because continental European and East Asian universities often publish first in the national language, and English-only surveys systematically undercount them.
Samples
| Sample | Rows | YES | NO | UNCLEAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| QS 2026 ranks 1–50 | 50 | 46 | 1 | 3 |
| QS 2026 ranks 51–100 | 49 | 43 | 0 | 6 |
| QS 2026 ranks 101–150 | 50 | 38 | 6 | 6 |
| Global South flagships | 37 | 17 | 17 | 3 |
| Total | 186 | 144 | 24 | 18 |
- The published summary said "187 universities". The source tables contain 186 data rows covering 171 unique names — 15 universities appear in two samples (flagged
name_overlap). Deduplicate onuniversityfor institution-level counts. - About 5 Global South YES cases are faculty/school-level, not university-wide.
- Last-updated dates are inconsistently displayed by universities.
- Two secondary-literature errors were caught and excluded during the audit (a paper conflating Quinnipiac's catalog with Qatar University; a micro-credential page cited as a "policy").
- Policies are published monthly — verify any single row before citing it as current.
Central Asia AI Education Audit 2026
Audit date: 2026-10-17.
31 leading universities across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan — national flagships and highest-ranked institutions, the ones a policy survey must not miss. Two questions per university: (a) does it publish a public, university-level AI usage policy on its official domain? (b) what AI-named degree programs or courses can be verified there? Searches ran in English, Russian and national languages.
The 81% UNVERIFIABLE rate is the highest of any region we have measured — a finding about transparency and discoverability as much as adoption. Turkmenistan's institutional web is largely closed to outside verification.
Online Degree Tuition 2026
740 online programs (MBA, DBA, business bachelor's, BSCS, MCS) at 537 U.S. institutions, each tuition figure taken from the university's official site and linked per row. Figures marked estimate are computed — e.g. per-credit price × required credits — with the basis explained in tuition_note. Built for comparison, not as quotes. Last verified 2026-10-15.
Reproducibility
Every dataset ships with the exact script that generated it from the raw audit tables, machine-readable citations, and a CC-BY-4.0 license. The datasets live in the Open Data Commons. Corrections are welcome — an audit that can't be challenged isn't science.