Education Verification API: Integrate Degree and Credential Checks into Your Platform

Why build education verification into your platform?

Education credential fraud is more common than most hiring platforms account for. Studies consistently find that 30–46% of job seekers misrepresent their educational background in some way — from inflating graduation dates to listing degrees from institutions that do not exist.

The cost of a bad hire who misrepresented their credentials is well-documented: legal exposure under negligent hiring doctrine, compliance failures in regulated industries, and the direct cost of replacing the hire. For healthcare, finance, and licensed professions, the stakes are higher — a fraudulent credential can expose employers to regulatory action.

Building verification into your platform — rather than leaving it to candidates or manual HR review — creates a defensible, auditable process. The VerifyED API is designed specifically for this use case: fast enough to run during application intake, accurate enough to flag diploma mills automatically, and flexible enough to fit into any hiring stack.

Authentication

All API requests require an API key passed in the X-API-Key header. API keys are scoped to your account and can be rotated from the API key management dashboard.

curl -H "X-API-Key: sk_live_your_key_here" \
  "https://verifyed.org/api/v1/search?q=stanford+university"

Keep your API key out of client-side code and version control. Use environment variables or a secrets manager. Rate limits and usage are tracked per key, so use separate keys for production and development environments.

Core verification workflow

A typical education verification flow has three stages:

1. Search — match the institution name from the candidate's application to a verified school record
2. Lookup — retrieve full details including accreditation status, country, and diploma mill flag
3. Decide — apply your business logic based on the isDiplomaMill flag, accreditation status, and country

Step 1: Search for the institution

GET /api/v1/search?q=northeastern+university&country=US&limit=5

# Response
{
  "results": [
    {
      "id": "us-nces-166683000001",
      "name": "Northeastern University",
      "country": "US",
      "state": "MA",
      "city": "Boston",
      "type": "4-year",
      "isDiplomaMill": false,
      "accredited": true,
      "score": 0.98
    },
    ...
  ]
}

Use the score field to rank results by match confidence. For programmatic processing, accept results above 0.85 and queue lower-confidence matches for human review.

Step 2: Retrieve full school record

GET /api/v1/schools/us-nces-166683000001

# Response
{
  "id": "us-nces-166683000001",
  "name": "Northeastern University",
  "country": "US",
  "state": "MA",
  "city": "Boston",
  "type": "4-year",
  "isDiplomaMill": false,
  "accredited": true,
  "accreditationBodies": ["NECHE"],
  "website": "https://northeastern.edu",
  "closedAt": null,
  "sources": ["NCES IPEDS 2023"]
}

Step 3: Apply verification logic

The key fields for making a verification decision:

Handling diploma mill detection

When isDiplomaMill: true, the institution is in the VerifyED diploma mill database — a curated list of 2,592 known degree mills cross-referenced from government, accreditation body, and academic fraud research databases.

Most platforms should treat a diploma mill result as an automatic disqualification trigger, with the application flagged for HR review rather than auto-rejected — to avoid adverse action on edge cases where an institution was mislabeled or where the candidate was themselves defrauded.

Autocomplete for application forms

The autocomplete endpoint is optimized for typeahead inputs — low latency, partial match support, and country filtering. It is the right endpoint to use when building a school name field in an application form.

GET /api/v1/autocomplete?q=north&country=US&limit=5

# Returns lightweight results optimized for UI typeahead
{
  "results": [
    { "id": "us-nces-166683000001", "name": "Northeastern University", "city": "Boston", "state": "MA" },
    { "id": "us-nces-174066000001", "name": "Northwestern University", "city": "Evanston", "state": "IL" },
    ...
  ]
}

Store the school ID (us-nces-166683000001) rather than the text name in your database. This allows you to run the full verification lookup later without re-matching against the institution name.

Error handling and edge cases

Institution not found

A search returning zero results does not mean the credential is fraudulent — it may mean the institution is too small to be in the database, uses a different legal name, or was recently closed. Queue these for manual review rather than auto-rejecting.

International institutions

For credentials from outside the US, Canada, UK, and Australia, accreditation status may not be populated. Use the country field to detect these and route to a NACES-member credential evaluation service for a second check.

Rate limits

Rate limit headers are returned with every response:

X-RateLimit-Limit: 1000
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 987
X-RateLimit-Reset: 1710000000

For high-volume processing, implement exponential backoff on 429 responses. Batch nightly verification runs off-peak rather than real-time if you expect volume spikes.

Integration patterns

ATS intake: verify at application

Call the search and lookup endpoints when an application is submitted. Store the verification result alongside the application record. Flag diploma mill results for recruiter review before screening calls are scheduled.

HRIS pre-employment: verify at offer

Trigger verification when a conditional offer is extended. This is the last checkpoint before onboarding and the standard integration point for background check platforms. Store the verification timestamp and result for audit purposes.

Background check enrichment

For screening companies that receive education history as plain text from applicants, call the autocomplete endpoint to canonicalize institution names before processing. This improves match rates on both your existing verification databases and the VerifyED lookup.

Getting started

The VerifyED API is free to explore. API keys are available from the API documentation page.

The database covers 912,000+ institutions across the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and 100+ other countries. Diploma mill coverage includes 2,592 known mills with ongoing updates from government and accreditation body sources.