Blog · Behind the data · September 15, 2026
I told Claude to build a nursing college list and only read our site
I did something this week I would have called cheating a few years ago. I told Claude to build a college list for a nursing applicant, and I told it exactly where to look.
The instruction was narrow on purpose: use highschoolreach.com as the only source, start at the nursing major page, open each college profile it links to, and build a reach / match / likely list using the admit rate into the program rather than the campus rate. Quote the numbers exactly. Say so when one is not reported.
About a minute later it had every California nursing program's admit rate into the program, net price with aid, and what graduates earn four years out, sorted into reach, match and likely.
The reason that matters is what it found.
Nursing is the major where the campus admit rate tells you the least. The same degree admits about 1 in 100 at UC Irvine, 3.5% at San Diego State, 18.7% at Cal State Fullerton and 86% at Cal State LA. A family reading campus admit rates would rank those four schools in an order that has almost nothing to do with their kid's actual odds.
There is a second trap underneath it. At most CSU campuses a freshman is not admitted into nursing at all. They enter as pre-nursing and compete for the program later, while transfer applicants apply straight into it. That is a different application strategy, not a footnote.
None of this is hidden. Those are the college systems' own published numbers. Almost nobody reads them, and the rankings do not carry them.
So we built the page the prompt reads, and put the prompt on it. Point your own AI at the nursing page and make it show its work.
