The nine applicant classes
How source eligibility values are folded into nine classes, and what happens to values that do not fit.
Sources do not divide applicants the same way. The federal enumeration has seventeen applicant-type codes live and around twenty-five in total; California's portal has six; and the two do not draw the same lines.
Stored verbatim — which is the only honest thing to do with them — those produce a front door with two dozen cards where "Small businesses" and "For profit organizations other than small businesses" sit apart.
So the stored value stays the source's own words and the grouping is ours, declared in one table rather than in six components.
The nine
Nonprofit · Higher Ed · K-12 & School District · State & Local Gov · Tribal · Business · Individual · Open to any applicant · Other
Nine rather than six because the federal vocabulary distinguishes higher education from school districts, and collapsing those throws away the one distinction the largest source in the catalogue actually publishes.
Open to any applicant is not a catch-all. It is a positive statement — the funder marked the programme open to any type of entity — and folding those records into Other hid them from every applicant whose own source says they may apply.
Other is the pile for values neither vocabulary classifies, and it is last because a catch-all that is not last reads as a category.
Values that do not fit
A source category with no honest home stays unmapped rather than being forced into the nearest one. A wrong mapping puts a record in front of someone it does not fit, which is worse than a missing filter. Wording the vocabulary cannot express is kept in elig_note.