General information about this dataset and how to interact with it
Organizations are a dataset within Slate in exactly the same way that People are dataset--it is a type of record that allows for data collection and querying.
Unlike People, however, Slate comes with a standard list of organizations already pre-populated. The original list is based on an amalgamation of College Board and Common Application data but it has been continually updated since then by Slate; when your instance was spun up, you got whatever the current list was and it does not change without human intervention.
To access organization records individually, use the Records tab:
Selecting a school gets you to the Organization dashboard page, which provides a quick overview in a standard format, and may also be customized using the dashboard configuration tools.
The account link on the right side of the Profile tab provides a view of the organization key, which is also seen in the upper right hand corner of the record, just like the person ID on a person record.
This key is the unique identifier, and each organization must have a different one.
The Slate Knowledge Base will tell you that this is the school's CEEB code; in fact, they even list it on the Org search page as such:
If it is all numbers, it might well be, since CEEB codes can only be numbers. However, it seems clear that there was some garbage data, and inadequate de-duping with the original list, since Adelphi University (as just one example) exists with keys of "2003" and "ade".
High schools are six digits; colleges are 4...BUT college codes may have leading zeros so it looks like 6 digits.
But! The Slate lists includes many, many schools and organizations that don't interact with the College Board—think vocational and technical colleges who aren't looking for SATs; there are also many, many foreign schools, and the college board has only given some international schools codes. Schools that do not have CEEB codes, but need to exist within Slate, end up having had weird codes applied to them somewhere along the line before they got to us, and now our data isn't great because students from Adelphi have to pick one or the other and their data ends up split between two different orgs.
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