A resource that publishes what each school costs should say who pays its own bills. This page is the whole model, written down, so it can be held against us.
Not for the guides, not for the workbooks, not for the interviews, not for a cohort seat. A student carrying a median $193,000 in federal debt is the wrong person to charge, and a resource funded by students would end up telling them what they want to hear.
No school, association, vendor or practice can pay to be listed, ranked, recommended, featured, or described more favourably. There are no placement fees, no referral commissions, and no sponsored entries. Every accredited program appears in our data whether it has ever spoken to us or not — including the ones our figures make look expensive.
Where an organisation pays, it is paying for something that takes our time or gives them something extra — a research question answered, students hosted, a certification assessed. It never changes what appears on this site about them.
Right now, almost nobody — and that is worth saying plainly rather than implying a business that does not yet exist. ChiroTrack is currently funded by my chiropractic practice in Oakland. Everything on this site is free because nothing here is yet sold.
That is not a permanent arrangement and it should not be. A thing funded by one person's evenings is fragile, and fragility is not a virtue. Below is the model it is being built toward, marked honestly for what exists and what does not.
| Who pays | For what | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Nobody | The guides, the findings, the interview library, the workbooks, and every cohort seat | free, always |
| Practising chiropractors | Listing a practice as one that hosts students, and being assessed against the host standard | planned |
| Practising chiropractors | Continuing education and mentor certification — professionals paying for their own development | planned |
| Schools and associations | Commissioned research on their own questions, using the corpus and federal data | planned |
| Schools, associations and organisations serving the profession | Sponsoring cohort seats and the printing of workbooks, so students continue not to pay | planned |
| Anyone | Paying to appear, rank higher, or be described differently | never |
The pattern underneath it: the people who capture the value pay, and students do not capture it. A student gets one career out of this. A school gets applicants who know what they are choosing. An association gets its members represented by someone with no admissions quota. A practice gets an associate pipeline. Those parties have budgets. A second-year student does not.
Because this is where resources like this usually go wrong, it is worth being specific.
If any of that makes a conversation shorter, it has saved both parties time.
We publish federal figures showing what every chiropractic program costs and what its graduates earn. A page like that is only worth reading if the reader can see who is paying for it — and most of the guidance available to prospective chiropractic students is produced by parties whose job includes filling a class, without ever saying so.
Naming the model is the cheapest way to be checkable. If we ever break one of the three rules above, this page is the evidence.
Last updated September 1, 2026 · Questions about funding: get in touch