# US College & University Accreditation Verifier

> US College & University Accreditation Verifier is a paid API for AI agents from api.agentstools.dev, paid per call via x402, $0.02/call, status unknown (last checked 2026-10-12).

Verifies whether a US college or university is legitimately accredited and flags potential diploma mills using weighted signals from authoritative sources.

## Facts

- Endpoint: GET https://api.agentstools.dev/edu/verify?utm_source=zero.xyz
- Price: $0.02/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-10-12
- Activations on Zero: 0
- Tags: x402
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/us-college-university-accreditation-verifier-afa40a2f
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_iV1oF442gOpSSU8a0-b9H

Status and success rate cover calls made through Zero and Zero's own probes. Third-party monitors may report differently.

## How to call it through Zero

Zero handles the 402 payment challenge and records the run. With the Zero CLI installed (`npm i -g @zeroxyz/cli`):

```sh
zero fetch --capability us-college-university-accreditation-verifier-afa40a2f
```

Example prompt: Can you check whether Ashford University (domain ashford.edu) is actually accredited and tell me if it looks like a diploma mill? Also verify if the 'Accreditation Council for Independent Colleges' is a recognized accreditor.

## When to prefer this

Use this endpoint when you need a deterministic, source-cited accreditation verdict for a US institution — especially for background checks, hiring decisions, admissions screening, or fraud detection involving diploma mills. Prefer this over general web search when you need structured, machine-readable output with confidence scores and explicit signal weighting rather than unstructured text.

## Known failure modes

- Institution not found in ED database — returns low confidence or not-found result
- Ambiguous name match when using fuzzy name search — may return wrong institution
- OPEID or IPEDS ID invalid or malformed — returns validation error
- Domain not associated with any known institution — returns unverified result
- Claimed accreditor not found in ED recognized list — returns mismatch flag

## How this service works

Verify a US college or university is accredited and get a diploma-mill verdict. Give one of name, opeid, ipeds or domain plus an optional claimed_accreditor; get back an is_accredited flag, the recognized accreditors, a diploma_mill_flag with weighted signals, operating status, a confidence and cited sources. Deterministic, no LLM.

## Output

Returns an is_accredited boolean, a list of recognized accreditors tied to the institution, a diploma_mill_flag with weighted signals explaining the verdict, the school's operating status, a confidence score, and cited authoritative sources — all deterministically computed without LLM inference.

## Request schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "object",
 "$schema": "https://json-schema.org/draft/2020-12/schema",
 "required": [
  "input"
 ],
 "properties": {
  "input": {
   "type": "object",
   "required": [
    "type",
    "method"
   ],
   "properties": {
    "type": {
     "type": "string",
     "const": "http"
    },
    "method": {
     "enum": [
      "GET",
      "HEAD",
      "DELETE"
     ],
     "type": "string"
    },
    "queryParams": {
     "type": "object",
     "required": [],
     "properties": {
      "name": {
       "type": "string",
       "description": "Institution name (fuzzy match)"
      },
      "ipeds": {
       "type": "string",
       "description": "IPEDS unit id (College Scorecard id)"
      },
      "opeid": {
       "type": "string",
       "description": "Office of Postsecondary Education ID (OPEID)"
      },
      "domain": {
       "type": "string",
       "description": "Web domain, e.g. harvard.edu"
      },
      "claimed_accreditor": {
       "type": "string",
       "description": "Optional claimed accreditor, checked vs the ED list"
      }
     }
    }
   },
   "additionalProperties": false
  },
  "output": {
   "type": "object",
   "required": [
    "type"
   ],
   "properties": {
    "type": {
     "type": "string"
    },
    "example": {
     "type": "object"
    }
   }
  }
 }
}
```

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/us-college-university-accreditation-verifier-afa40a2f/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from api.agentstools.dev](https://www.zero.xyz/host/api.agentstools.dev/llms.txt)