This fun and useful GitHub Actions plugin lets you search for colleges and universities in a country. Thank you Hipolabs for providing free API endpoint: http://universities.hipolabs.com/search?country=

This Actions only take one single input value country, which can be a word separate a single space (e.g. United States). Below shows an example of a GitHub Actions pipeline file named main.yml that can be put under .github/workflows folder to execute.

name: Test custom GitHub Action

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      country:
        description: Please type in name of country.
        required: true
        default: 'United States'

jobs:
  university_search_job:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: A job to search by university
    steps:
      - name: Checkout files
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        
      - name: University search
        uses: bryantson/universities-list-actions@v1
        id: search-university
        with:
          country: ${{ github.event.inputs.country }}

Everything gets printed inside a GitHub log. You can find university/college names sorted alphabetically in ascending order and their associated website links. A screenshot below shows a sample output.

You can also print total number of univerisites with total output. For example, you can add a print statement in a step like this in your Actions workflow to print that number.

- name: University search
  uses: bryantson/universities-list-actions@v1
  id: search-university
  with:
    country: ${{ github.event.inputs.country }}

- name: Get the output total
  run: echo "The total number of universities is ${{ steps.search-university.outputs.total }}"

As this is a simple GitHub Actions based on a public API, feel free to fork and to modify based on MIT license :)

MIT @ bryantson