Universities List API

Beginner's Pick Open Data / No Auth Required Beginner HTTPS
Free to Use
57 C
Measured Score 0 50 100 Speed 18/30 Consistency 20/20 Security 0/20 Browser access 15/15 Transparency 4/15 TESTED 2026-08-10

Overview

The Universities List API is a simple, free resource that returns university names, their country, and associated web domains from a community-maintained dataset. No authentication is required—just send a GET request with a country or name parameter and receive a JSON array. It is one of the easiest APIs to use for learning REST API basics because the response structure is minimal and predictable.

Beginner Tip

Filter results by country using the ?country=US query parameter to avoid getting the full 10,000+ entry list in one shot—this keeps responses fast and easy to parse.

Measurement Record

What actually happened when we called this API from our own infrastructure. Every value below was recorded by the request, not copied from the provider's documentation.

Request
GET http://universities.hipolabs.com/search?name=MIT&country=United+States
Result
HTTP 200 · application/json · 585 bytes
Response time
204 ms (median of 3) · fastest 202 ms
Browser CORS
Allowed — Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Served by
nginx/1.14.0
Recorded
2026-08-10

Fields Returned

Top-level fields present in the response we captured, with the type and value we actually received.

Field Type Value received
state-province null null
name string William Mitchell College of Law
domains array [1 item]
alpha_two_code string US
web_pages array [1 item]
country string United States

Captured Response

Captured from a real request to http://universities.hipolabs.com/search?name=MIT&country=United+States on 2026-08-10. Long arrays and nested objects are truncated to keep the shape readable.

JSON Response · Captured
[
  {
    "state-province": null,
    "name": "William Mitchell College of Law",
    "domains": [
      "wmitchell.edu"
    ],
    "alpha_two_code": "US",
    "web_pages": [
      "http://www.wmitchell.edu/"
    ],
    "country": "United States"
  }
]

Field Reference

name Full official name of the university.
country Country where the university is located, using full English country name.
alpha_two_code ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code (e.g., US, GB, JP).
domains List of web domains associated with the university (e.g., ["mit.edu"]).
web_pages List of official website URLs for the university.

Implementation Example

Calls a real endpoint of this API. Replace any placeholder credentials with your own key.

Request
const url = "http://universities.hipolabs.com/search?name=MIT&country=United+States";
const response = await fetch(url);
if (!response.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${response.status}`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);

What Can You Build?

Note: These code examples are AI-generated and unverified. Always refer to the official API documentation for accurate usage.

How This API Fails

We deliberately sent this API a broken request and recorded exactly what came back on 2026-08-10. Knowing the shape of an error before you hit it makes error handling much easier to write.

HTTP 404 Requesting a path that does not exist text/html

Returned an HTML error page rather than JSON — worth knowing if your client assumes every response can be parsed as JSON.

Common Errors & Troubleshooting

Generated guidance based on this API's documentation, not observed by us. Treat it as a starting point and check against the provider's own error reference.

Very large response payload Calling the endpoint without any query parameters returns all universities at once.
Always pass at least a country or name parameter to limit results, e.g., ?country=Canada.
Empty array returned Country name is spelled incorrectly or uses an abbreviation instead of the full name.
Use the full English country name as it appears in ISO 3166, e.g., United States not USA.
HTTP vs HTTPS mixed-content warning The base endpoint uses HTTP which browsers may block from HTTPS pages.
Fetch the data server-side (Node.js, Python) or use a proxy to avoid mixed-content browser restrictions.

Measured Score Breakdown

Live HTTP request to the API endpoint

Speed 18/30
Consistency 20/20
Security 0/20
Browser access 15/15
Transparency 4/15
Endpoint Response Time 204ms

Fully tested on Aug 10, 2026

Technical Specifications

Auth No Auth
HTTPS REQUIRED
CORS UNKNOWN
Category Open Data
Difficulty Beginner
Endpoint last called: 2026-08-10

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