Data sources

College data

All institution data comes from the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard, the federal dataset covering cost, admissions, completion, debt and earnings for institutions that participate in federal student aid programs.

The figures currently shown are from the 2022-23 reporting year, which is the most recent Scorecard release. Every college profile states this alongside its numbers rather than leaving you to assume they are current.

Which colleges are included

This site covers institutions that award an associate degree or higher. That is 3,879 colleges: community colleges, four-year colleges and universities.

Certificate-only and non-degree institutions are excluded. They are a large share of the federal dataset, but they are a different kind of decision from the one this site is built to help with, and their figures distort comparisons: most report no admissions data, and their average net prices are low enough to sit above every genuine option in a cheapest-first sort.

The filter uses the highest credential an institution awards, not its most common one. That distinction matters. A community college whose most frequent award is a certificate still grants associate degrees, and filtering on the more obvious field would have removed real colleges serving thousands of students.

Missing numbers

You will see “Not reported” on this site. That is deliberate. College Scorecard suppresses figures when a group is small enough that publishing them could identify individuals, and some institutions simply do not report every measure.

Where a figure is missing we say so. We do not show a zero, a dash, or a blank cell, because when you are comparing two colleges you need to be able to tell “this costs nothing” from “nobody published this”. A genuine zero, such as a 0% acceptance rate, is shown as a zero, because that is a real measurement.

What the figures mean

• Average net price is what students receiving federal aid actually paid on average per year, after grants and scholarships. It is an average across many students with very different family finances, so your own figure may differ substantially.
• Published cost is the sticker price: tuition, fees, housing, food and books for one academic year before any aid. Very few students pay it.
• Graduation rate is the share of first-time, full-time students who completed within 150% of the normal time, so six years for a four-year degree. It excludes transfer and part-time students, which understates completion at colleges serving many of them, including most community colleges.
• Median earnings is the median for former students ten years after they first enrolled, working and not enrolled elsewhere. It reflects the mix of subjects a college teaches and the region it sits in as much as the quality of its teaching.
• Median debt covers federal loans only, for students who completed. Private and parent loans are not included, so the real figure is often higher.

Bureau of Labor Statistics: occupations

Each major page lists the occupations that field of study prepares people for, with what each pays and how fast it is expected to grow. Two federal sources sit behind that, and the difference between them matters.

• Which occupations. The National Center for Education Statistics publishes a crosswalk from fields of study (CIP codes) to occupations (SOC codes). It records what a subject prepares you for. It is not a record of where graduates went, and we have no such data. Nothing on this site is a placement rate.
• Pay and growth. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Projections programme publishes median pay, projected employment change and average annual openings per occupation. The median covers everyone already working in that occupation, at every level of experience. It is not what someone earns a year out of a degree, and it is usually higher than an early-career figure.
• What a projection is. A ten-year employment projection is a model, not a measurement. It is the government’s best estimate of how an occupation will change, and it can be wrong.
• Many of these occupations need a licence, or a master’s or doctorate on top of a bachelor’s. Clinical psychology is the obvious example. The pay figure alone does not tell you how long the road is.

How often this updates

College Scorecard publishes roughly annually. When a new reporting year is released we import it as a new record rather than overwriting the previous one, so a college’s history is preserved and each page can state which year it is showing.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a new projection decade every other year. Our importer reads the base and projection years out of the file rather than assuming them, so a page cannot label new figures with the old decade.

Corrections

If a figure here looks wrong, it is worth checking it against the college directly, and against College Scorecard itself. Where we have made an error rather than reproduced one, we will correct it and say so.

We are not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Education, and this site is not an official government resource.