White House releases 'College Scorecard' website

[Nedcone]

@NPR

President Obama has been talking about creating a Consumer Reports-style college ratings system for more than a year. But the effort seemed to get bogged down in politics and a debate over what metrics to include.

Well, in a Saturday surprise, Obama unveiled his new College Scorecard this morning.

“You’ll be able to see how much each school’s graduates earn, how much debt they graduate with, and what percentage of a school’s students can pay back their loans,” the president said in his weekly address.

But calling this a scorecard is like calling Mt. Vesuvius a hill; at best, it’s an understatement. It’s also technically wrong. What the government released today isn’t a scorecard at all — it’s a data dump of epic proportions.

Here’s how it works: You can type in the name of a college here, and the site will tell you lots of old basics, including average annual cost and graduation rate.

But there’s also lots of useful, new information. You can now see how much students earn 10 years after entering a school (thanks to a joint effort between the departments of Education and the Treasury). Also accessible for the first time are the percentage of first-generation students at a given school and the percentage of students who repay at least a dollar of principal on their federal loans within three years.

Link to story: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/09/12/439742485/president-obamas-new-college-scorecard-is-a-torrent-of-data

And link to college scorecard: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/

It’s very comprehensive, and has more data than any other analysis out there. Very useful, I wish I had had it earlier.

[Nedcone]

So what do you all think?