College Scorecard is an online tool provided by the US Department of Education to aid students, parents and others in the evaluation and/or selection of an institution of higher education. The website, first rolled-out in September 2015 as an Obama Administration initiative, provides users with access to an astounding amount of data about college admissions, student demographics and after-graduation outcomes. The site provides no rankings or judgments but instead allows users to compare colleges by a number of criteria and do their own analyses.
The site is well designed in its ability to organize an enormous amount of data for quick access and comparison. The user can filter the set by programmes/degrees; location; size of undergraduate student body; school name; type of school; specialized mission (e.g. historical black college and university; women-only); and religious affiliation. The results can then be limited by average annual cost, graduation rate and salary-after-attending. Each of these filters includes a marker for the national median (e.g. graduation rate = 42 per cent).
Another important feature is the side-by-side comparison of up to ten colleges/universities. In addition to the already-mentioned criteria, the comparison includes percentage of full-time enrollment, socio-economic diversity, race/ethnicity demographics, student debt, rate of students returning after one year, salary after attending, average annual costs by family income and SAT/ACT ranges. Each school also has a profile page indicating its location, Web address and a complete complement of institution specific metrics.
Other features on the site include links to a marketing brochure (PDF) to advertise the benefits of the site, a how-to-guide (PDF), an introductory video and links to a few sites about financial aid.
The underlying data sets, which also include student completion rate, debt and repayment, and earnings, are also freely available for download from the site. These include “data from 1996 through 2016 for all undergraduate degree-granting institutions of higher education”.
Because the site is a relatively new initiative, it is not perfect. For one, it is limited to data about undergraduate programmes. There is also so much data available that one has to carefully read the footnotes to understand the parameters of a particular measurement. For instance, salary after graduation data is based only on students who received federal financial aid and were thus surveyed for that information. A few early critics also noted that, for various reasons, many schools were missing from the site. Other criticisms included warnings that the site obsesses over data at the expense of the kind of qualitative information that helps distinguish an institution.
Obviously, there is only so much a prospective student can learn about a school based solely on data, but admissions and outcome data is indeed of great interest to students and parents and this site is particularly good for the kind of head-to-head comparison which students had traditionally done in a more tedious, painstaking way.
Under the current administration, it is hard to speculate about whether the site will change, for better or worse. As of today, it is a useful though imperfect tool for broad-brush comparisons of undergraduate programmes.
