Niche Scraper - School Districts, Schools & Colleges

Niche Scraper - School Districts, Schools & Colleges

Turn Niche profiles into structured rows: the overall Niche grade, every subject grade, the full statistics table with its national comparisons, all published rankings, contact details, star rating, review count and the schools inside a district. Covers school districts, K-12 schools, colleges, graduate schools and places. Export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML.

Who uses it	What they pull from Niche
Real estate and proptech	District grades and area income, rent and home value, joined to a listing
Education researchers	Proficiency, graduation rate, spend per student and teacher pay at scale
EdTech and enrolment teams	Ranked lists of districts and schools by state, with contact details
Relocation services	A comparable grade and rating for every district in a metro
Journalists	Rankings and review sentiment across a state

What it does

Pick an entity type and a state, and the Actor reads Niche's own published sitemap to find the profiles, then opens each one and extracts:

• 🎓 Grades: the overall Niche grade plus every subject grade the profile carries, as a label-to-grade map. For a district that is Academics, Diversity, Teachers, College Prep, Clubs & Activities, Administration, Sports, Food and Resources & Facilities.
• 📊 Statistics with national baselines: percent proficient in reading and maths, average graduation rate, student count, free or reduced lunch share, average teacher salary, share of teachers in their first two years, and expenses per student, each paired with the national figure Niche prints beside it.
• 🏆 Rankings: every published list the profile appears on, split into the list name, the rank and the size of the field, deduplicated.
• 📍 Contact and location: website, phone, street address, city, state and ZIP.
• ⭐ Reviews: the star rating and review count on every row, and optionally up to ten review excerpts.
• 🏫 Member schools: optionally, the schools listed on a district or college profile, each with its own rating and review count.
• 🏘️ Area: the name of the surrounding town and its median household income, median rent and median home value.

What you can do with Niche data

🏡 Score a housing market by its schools.

Pull every district in a state with its grade, proficiency and area home value, and rank the ones where school quality outruns house prices.

📈 Benchmark a district.

Every statistic arrives beside the national figure Niche prints next to it, so a row is already a comparison rather than a number needing context.

🗺️ Build a state-wide table.

Set state and let it walk the sitemap. Rankings arrive parsed, so "#26 of 217" is two numbers you can sort on.

Why choose this scraper

	What you get
Five profile types	School districts, K-12 schools, colleges, graduate schools and places, all through the same row shape.
Grades as data, not text	Grades come back as a {"Academics": "A", "Teachers": "B+"} map with the screen-reader prefix and the "minus" spelling already normalised to A-.
Statistics with the national baseline	Expenses Per Student: $26,445 / student arrives with Expenses Per Student (national): $17,834 beside it.
Self-healing against the bot wall	Niche is behind HUMAN (PerimeterX). When a page comes back flagged the Actor takes a new exit IP and retries that same URL, rather than burning the run against a dead address.
Dead links cost nothing	Niche's sitemaps carry a 2025 timestamp and some slugs have since died. A 404 is skipped on sight and never billed. Retrying them is also what escalates HUMAN from a challenge to an IP ban, so skipping them protects the rest of the run.
Public pages only	Niche's robots.txt disallows its /api/ prefix. This Actor does not touch it: it reads the published sitemap and the profile pages.

What a row looks like

{
  "entityType": "school-districts",
  "name": "Milton Public Schools",
  "url": "https://www.niche.com/k12/d/milton-public-schools-ma/",
  "overallGrade": "A",
  "grades": { "Academics": "A", "Diversity": "B", "Teachers": "A", "College Prep": "A", "Sports": "B+" },
  "stats": {
    "Percent Proficient - Reading": "45%",
    "Average Graduation Rate": "93%",
    "Students": "4,503",
    "Average Teacher Salary": "$79,373",
    "Expenses Per Student": "$19,356 / student",
    "Expenses Per Student (national)": "$17,834"
  },
  "rankings": [{ "list": "Best School Districts in Massachusetts", "rank": 26, "outOf": 217 }],
  "website": "https://www.miltonps.org/",
  "phone": "(617) 696-4808",
  "streetAddress": "25 GILE RD",
  "cityStateZip": "MILTON, MA 02186",
  "state": "MA",
  "zip": "02186",
  "rating": 4.23,
  "reviewCount": 31,
  "areaMedianHouseholdIncome": 188529,
  "areaMedianHomeValue": 933200
}

Configure the run

Input	What it does
entityType	school-districts, k12-schools, colleges, graduate-schools or places.
startUrls	Specific Niche profile URLs. Skips discovery.
state	Two-letter state code. Applied to the sitemap, so it costs nothing.
nameContains	Keep only profiles whose URL contains this text.
includeMemberSchools	Attach the schools listed on the profile.
includeReviews	Attach up to ten review excerpts.
proxyConfiguration	Residential is required; see below.
maxItems	How many profiles to return.

Free users

Free-plan runs return up to 10 profiles as a preview. Upgrade your Apify plan to collect up to 1,000,000 per run.

Run it

1. Create a free Apify account with $5 in credit.
2. Open the Niche Scraper.
3. Pick an entityType, type a state, and click Start.
4. Export the results as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the Dataset tab.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=parseforge/niche-school-district-profiles-scraper"

• "Rank Massachusetts school districts by graduation rate and show me the area home values."
• "Which New York districts are graded A for teachers but below average on spend per student?"
• "Pull the Niche profiles for these five districts and compare their proficiency scores."

Use the Apify Actor "parseforge/niche-school-district-profiles-scraper" to read Niche profiles. Input: { "entityType": "school-districts" | "k12-schools" | "colleges" | "graduate-schools" | "places", "state": "<two-letter code>", "nameContains": "<text>", "maxItems": <n> }. It returns overallGrade, a grades map, a stats map with national baselines, parsed rankings, address, phone, website, rating and review count. Call it with the ApifyClient and my APIFY_TOKEN.

Troubleshooting

Why do I need a residential proxy?

Niche is behind HUMAN (PerimeterX). Measured 2026-09-07, plain HTTP with a Chrome TLS fingerprint got 403 with a px-captcha body on every content path over both datacenter and residential exits; a real browser on a residential exit cleared it first try. Datacenter will not work.

Why does the log say it rotated the exit IP?

Because a page came back with the HUMAN block page. A flagged exit stays flagged, so retrying the same URL on it only spends the clock. The Actor takes a new browser on a new proxy session and retries that same URL. Up to six rotations per run, then it stops rather than burning the whole budget.

Why were some URLs skipped as 404?

Niche's sitemaps carry a 2025 timestamp and a share of the slugs in them no longer resolve. Those are skipped on sight and never billed.

Why is a statistic missing?

Niche fills its statistics table by entity type and by what the underlying federal data covers. A college profile carries admissions and cost figures a district profile does not, and a small district may have no proficiency figure published at all. Empty means Niche did not print it.

Why fewer profiles than maxItems?

The state and name filters matched fewer live profiles than you asked for, or the run hit its time budget. The log prints the candidate count after filtering.

FAQ

Question	Answer
Which profile types are supported?	Five: school districts, K-12 schools, colleges, graduate schools, and places (towns, neighbourhoods and counties).
Do I need a Niche account?	No. Only public profile pages are read.
Does it use Niche's API?	No. Their robots.txt disallows /api/, so the Actor reads the published sitemap and the profile pages instead.
Can I scrape one specific district?	Yes, paste its profile URL into startUrls.
Are the grades letter grades?	Yes, normalised: A, A-, B+ and so on, with Niche's screen-reader prefix and "minus" spelling cleaned up.
Do I get the full reviews?	You always get the star rating and review count. Tick includeReviews for up to ten review excerpts.
How many profiles per run?	Free plan: 10. Paid: up to 1,000,000, bounded by how many live profiles match your filters.
Is this an official Niche product?	No. It is unofficial and reads only public pages.

🆘 Need help? Email parseforge@protonmail.com with your run ID, your input, and what you expected.

⚠️ Disclaimer. This Actor is unofficial and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Niche.com. It collects only publicly available school, college and place profile data. Review excerpts are written by individuals: do not use them to identify, profile, or target anyone. You are responsible for using the data in compliance with Niche's terms and applicable laws.