We’ve made a lot of changes to the College Scorecard, and we want to know what you think.

College Search & Selection
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I’m Ted Mitchell – U.S. Under Secretary of Education.

(Basically, that means that a big part of my job is to help make sure the country has the best-educated, most competitive workforce in the world. Part of how we measure that is by the proportion of college graduates we’ll have by the year 2020. And as college costs and student debt keep rising, the choice you make when you’re looking for the right college has never been more important. Which brings me to the point.)

I’m hoping you’ll help me with something.

On Saturday, we released a newly revamped version of the “College Scorecard” – a tool designed to give students, parents, teachers, and anyone looking to get a higher level of education access to reliable data on all of the nation’s higher education institutions (and by the way – it was the President’s idea!). It’ll tell you things like how much a given school’s typical student earns once she graduates. How much debt she’s likely to graduate with, and whether she can pay back her loans. That way, we get a better sense of which schools across the country are doing the best job of preparing our students for success in the 21st century.

In short, it’s designed to give you key pieces of real-world information about potential schools to help you make the best-informed decision possible.

I’m proud of the tool we built. But the work is just beginning. In the months to come, we’ll continue upgrading the Scorecard based on what we learn from students, parents, and counselors – in other words, people like you. We want this thing to work – we want it to be easy to use, easy to understand. We want to make sure it will help you get the education you want.

So I wanted to put it right in front of you and reach out to you directly to start a conversation that starts with a simple question: What do you think? Take a look, enter your information, and share your thoughts in the comments below. I’ll be following this thread, along with other Administration staff, and will be responding to some of what you say.

So, go ahead – give it a shot: http://collegescorecard.ed.gov

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MODERATOR’S NOTE: This poster is legitimate.

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As others have posted in related threads - it seems a bit misleading that the “income” data is only based on those students who had federal loans (or work study?) during their time in college. This should be clearer to readers.

While the information regarding net cost for different income levels is there, the result of some searches gives you a single “net cost” value (again, like above) without it being clear that this is only for students with household income less then some “x” ($68,000?). A user, but particularly a student (16, 17 years old) looking at these results may not understand they have to look further to find THEIR likely net cost.

Your database definitions under religious affiliation include ‘none’ and ‘not applicable’ (which is what the Navigator uses), however when doing an “advanced” search, those choices do not show up in the drop-down list, so there is no way to search by “no religious affiliation” (a little coding error, I’d guess).

good luck!

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@TedMitchell, thanks for posting on CC! Here is a link to a thread that was started recently: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1810325-the-new-federal-government-college-scorecard-site.html#latest

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I like the way it looks. Easy to understand. I do wish that you’d break out any honors colleges…Those are competitive and resulting stats will therefore vary, probably significantly, from the regular student body (eg ASU/Barrett Honors college).

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Well timed—we’ve had another thread running about this the past couple days, and so some of us have been actively thinking about it for the past few days.

In my opinion the site is better than the first attempt, but I have a few concerns, with the biggest to my mind being the issue of pay data—while it’s probably better than the self-reported, pretty much non-fact-checked data provided from sources such as PayScale, it’s still limited to those students who received federal aid. Is this really a representative sample, though? One could easily suppose that those students who didn’t receive federal aid might have ended up with different earnings, thus either penalizing or rewarding (it’s unclear which) schools with a low percentage of federal aid recipients. Is there any evidence that federal aid recipients are actually statistically representative of the larger student body at all schools, at least in terms of post-graduation earnings?

Second, it appears that the graduation rate problem has not been fixed. To take me as an example, I count against the graduation statistics for the institution I started at (since I transferred out), and I don’t count toward the graduation statistics of the institutions I received my associate’s and bachelor’s degrees from (since I transferred into each of them). This is a huge problem, and one that unfairly penalizes schools that take in a large number of transfers (such as colleges with articulation agreements with community colleges, which I would expect the administration would like to support).

That said, the transparency in the data is most appreciated—the ability to download all the data, whatever flaws it might have (and the fact that those flaws are documented, albeit in some cases inscrutably), so that everyone can work with it however they might like, is an amazing plus.

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I was disappointed with the site. The look and functioning were all top notch, but the data itself isn’t all that useful. I have to admit to bias towards elite schools here. I’m sure it would have been very useful for someone who was looking at for profit schools to make sure they went to a quality institution and not somewhere with a 90% drop out rate.

For elite schools (say, top 50 in the USNEWS rankings) the data is lacking. For instance, a 10 year horizon isn’t really enough for schools like Reed, Oberlin, etc where a good percentage of students go on to substantial graduate work.

So, for 80% of the population I think it’s a valuable tool, but not so much for those of us who hang out here at College Confidential and are more focused on the top tier schools.

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Along with other “pay data” issues mentioned by others, I wonder the following:

Are wage & salary figures adjusted for standard of living? For instance, $50,000 does not have the same purchasing power in Boston and North Dakota.

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@TedMitchell: Could you explain exactly who are included in the calculation of average earning after graduation? Graduates who have had federal direct loans and who have received Pell Grants ONLY? How many classes/years have been tracked to come up with the average earning figures? Is the info regarding how many graduates or what percentage of graduates are included in the calculation available? Thanks.

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This is definitely a group that appreciates a link to methodology and data sources on ranking, scorecard, etc sites.

I like seeing the average annual cost (incorporating need-based aid). Looking at my kids’ college data it’s dead-on accurate. Not so accurate for another college she was accepted to as it meets need when it wants to, not for everyone, but the effort is appreciated.

The link to each school’s NPC is also great, those can be hard to find on some college web sites.

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And to continue with the question of pay data, are all majors lumped together? If so, then schools with little or no engineering are probably going to have much lower salaries than schools where the majority of students are engineers. I don’t know if you can get such data, but otherwise the category seems to be somewhat misleading. For example, Williams graduates have a salary of approximately $58,000 vs. Lehigh with a salary of approximately $76,000. Would that be the case if you compared English majors at the two schools?

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This is actually a great idea, even though it needs some improvements.

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@TedMitchell…I have been working with the site the past few days and believe it offers some excellent data points for those making the all important college decision. I like the easy to read charts showing costs, graduation rates, and 10 year median salaries for those that used federal aid. I also like how the user can splice the data rankings several ways from the % above the high school wage, to 10 median year salary, to cost, to graduation rate, etc.
A few suggestions I would like to see, but may not be possible. It would be great to see the breakout of females versus males and even race when looking at 10 year median salaries. Unfortunately women and minorities are known to be underpaid. If two schools had the exact same median 10 year salary, I believe, in general, the school with a higher percentage of women and minorities would provide more overall value. Also, I noticed that one of the large for profit schools showed very different costs and graduation rates for its various locations. However, the 10 year median salary was identical for all its locations. In reality we all know this is not the case, but it must be hard to distinguish the individual locations based on tax returns.
Overall I really like the tool and believe it allows the user to make well informed decisions. Of course, one must look at his/her own financial situation, financial aid package, in state versus out of state tuition, merit awards, AP/IB/CLEP/transfer credit, etc. And even these considerations do not include the academic and nonacademic needs of the individual student.
Kudos to you and your teams. I saw this tool when it first came out a while back and the updated version from a few days ago. I certainly noticed a huge improvement and believe you’ve created some great data points to help both parents and students in making their college decision.
Thank you for this great tool and for asking for our insights.

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Clearly, the data isn’t granular enough to be the basis for choosing a school. As a first cut, though, this data can serve as a red flag for schools with high costs, low completion rates, and below-average salaries. In fact, for-profit and career schools are marketed as cost-effective career boosters, so low graduation rates and salaries suggest that school is failing to deliver on its promises.

Lower salaries from, say, a small liberal arts school or teachers college might be more indicative of post-graduation choices than an indicator of a problem.

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@TedMitchell - I looked at it and was disappointed because of so many things it does not do and does not factor in There is also something else I wish the Education department would do that would be more helpful, IMHO, for students, parents, and families.

I will start with the latter first (Part A, B, and C):

Part A:

“Proposal: All schools that offer federal financial aid in any form but also use an institutional methodology for calculating estimated family contribution should be required to disclose their formulae for calculating institutional EFC, and provide this information with admission and financial aid letters.”

My reason for this is simple: at many, many schools that use IM, it is a black box and there is no way of knowing if they did calculations correctly or captured/transcribed data properly. At one school, my IM EFC was 15.78% higher than my FAFSA EFC and they would not explain why/how.

Part B;

Proposal: Schools should not be allowed to refer to unsubsidized student loans and/or parent PLUS loans as “Financial Aid.” These are the loans that are causing the student loan debt problem and the obscene marketing of them by private companies as “Aid” is disgusting.

Part C:

Require schools to keep their net price calculators current and up to date. Nothing says useless like an NPC using 2010-2011 data.

Now to the main topic, the Scorecard: The information provided is useless because it is fundamentally flawed in design. First, it only shows the “median” salary for those students who have received “federal financial aid.” Not the “mean” but the “median”, and it is ten years after attending. This means absolutely nothing because it does not show data by major. Only then would it be meaningful. What good is knowing a “median” salary of graduates if school is 90% engineering students and 10% arts students? Not a darn thing.

Now for one more thing, which I know you did not ask for: Why is the Department of Education penalizing middle class families with the significantly reduced FAFSA Asset Protection Allowance for the 2015-16 school year? For middle class working families with moderate assets, this puts a significant hit in our abilities to qualify for federal loan aid and/or pay costs without unsubsidized loans…

And finally, this is a tool that appears to be the government telling people, “see this is why you should go to state schools.” From a parent that has a student in a state flagship university and a mid-sized private school (and we pay about the same out of pocket for each), the differences are staggering and cannot be measured by a tool like this.

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@CollegeDadofTwo: I agree with most everything you say, but I have to disagree on your preference for mean salary data over medians—the median is a much more robust statistical measure, because it’s less susceptible to changing due to extreme outliers. If you have a graduating class of 100 students (to pick a nice round number) that, 10 years out, has 99 individuals making $20thousand and 1 making $20million, the mean earnings of that graduating class is $219,800, but the median is the much more useful (and realistic) value of $20,000.

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Hi @panpacific: Great question. Here’s how we came up with this: First, we pulled data for freshmen who received federal financial aid (Pell Grants, loans, and campus-based aid) at each institution.

Then we matched them with tax records, and measured their earnings at 6 through 10 years after they started. Both graduates and non-graduates are included in the measure.

Each earnings data point that’s reported reflects to cohorts of students, so the 2001 and 2002 cohorts are measured in 2011 and 2012 for the 10-year median earnings included on the Scorecard. At some schools, there may be more or fewer students included in the earnings cohort, based on the percentage of students at the school who received federal financial aid.

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Hi @dfbdfb - thanks for asking!

Yes, the earnings measures only include students who received federal financial aid. About 70% of all graduating postsecondary students receive federal Pell Grants and/or federal loans. We recognize that both the fractions of students receiving Title IV aid and the fraction of students with grants, loans, or both vary greatly by sector.

Given the limitations of our data, these are the best measures of post-college earnings currently available. Additionally, we did use the first-time, full-time completion rates reported to IPEDS on the Scorecard. That’s because, despite its limitations, those data are the most reliable completion data we have right now. However, we have identified a promising alternative in completion rates calculated using data on federal financial aid recipients.

We know there are limitations with schools’ reporting on those data, and that new IPEDS rates for part-time and transfer students won’t be collected until next year - so we are working to find the most accurate, valuable completion rate data to help students and families.

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Hi @TempeMom - thanks so much for the feedback. The data on the scorecard are provided at the level that the institution chooses to report to the federal government - in some cases, that means systems; in others, it means institutions or branch campuses.

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@TedMitchell

I’ll tell you upfront that I have a lot of issues with both what you really wanted to do, which was a ranking system, as well as this scorecard. Some have already been mentioned. One I focused on in the other thread I will repeat here, with some modifications since the other post was in response to a particular point another member made.

The essence of the point was that there are many issues with using average salaries as the benchmark of how “good” a school is. I anticipate you saying that you are simply providing data (limited though your data is in this regard), but as you can see from the reaction already that is not how it is going to be perceived. As another member said on the other thread, why are you creating a system that rewards schools for pumping out more investment bankers? It is troubling when the government (again!!!) tries to push the “free market” in one direction or another by putting its stamp on a certain value judgement. Especially one that I think most will agree is extremely ill advised in this case.

And here is my main point: It also strikes me as hypocritical, because the government has various programs that they encourage people to sign up for right after getting that undergraduate diploma that are very low paying. Teach for America, The Peace Corps, etc. Not only do these people earn less right away, but it would be a very reasonable conclusion that they are earning less a few years out due to the delay in getting into a career path job and their predisposition to not putting money as their primary motivation. As another member then added, it is not unreasonable to assume that these kinds of graduates are also more likely to go to graduate school when they are done with this very valuable stint in service to others, thus further delaying their entry onto the path of higher earnings. Finally, some schools such as my alma mater have put a heavy emphasis on service to others, in this case due to Katrina. To the point of making it a significant part of the admissions process and a required part of the curriculum in order to graduate. Thus students from Tulane and similar schools are more predisposed to volunteering and taking positions in these and similar organizations. Why do you want to discourage that, or at least have the appearance of doing so?

So which is it, Government? Fixate on earning levels out of college and ignore your marketing to be socially giving, or try and obey ones “better angels” and drag ones school’s “ranking” down? Sigh… Talk about your mixed messages. Sometimes even just reporting a statistic gives it an importance that it shouldn’t receive. But information is information, and I would never advocate holding it back just because it could be misinterpreted. But to then make it part of a ranking/scorecard system is a whole 'nuther thing. As yet another member said in reply to my last couple of sentences, “Yeah, but the feds then have the moral and ethical responsibility to highlight and 'essplain exactly what their data shows: salaries of the ‘poorer’ kids 10 years out…” I could add to “poorer kids” a qualification regarding those with big hearts.

With kind regards. Oh, and thank you for deciding to post on CC. I have to say, it takes some guts!