Open up the fire hoses…lots of new data about colleges was released over the weekend. I will spend more time examining this tool and looking for ways to incorporate into our Paying For College activities but wanted to make the community aware of it. At first glance, it appears to be a more user-friendly version of College Navigator, which we have used in a host of our lessons and activities.

Here are the major differences I noticed with the new tool:

• Provides data on post-college wages which they describe as the median earnings of former students who received federal financial aid ten years after starting college.
• Calculates what percentage of a student cohort (six years after first enrolling college) is earning more than the average wage for a high school graduate, which for a 25-34 year-old is about $25,000.
• More user-friendly output.  I ran a quick search of California colleges with engineering programs and got this screen shot which focused on cost, graduation rate and salary after attending for 50 colleges:

Clicking on More Details allows you to dive in deeper into these categories:

Here are some articles that provide additional background on this tool and its purpose:

• From NY Times:  “They said the new scorecard — which can be found atcollegescorecard.ed.gov — will allow students and parents to compare schools based on measurements that are important to them. Using the website, for example, a student might search for schools with average annual costs of under $10,000, a graduation rate higher than 75 percent and average salaries after graduation of more than $50,000 per year.

  The data is based on students who have received a federal loan or grant to attend college, but officials said their economists believe it is representative of all students. And they said the new government data offers critical information that is not available elsewhere, a point underscored on Saturday as researchers began mining the data for trends. In a Twitter post, one writer called it an “amazing new treasure trove” of education data.

• From Vox Education: “But for too many students, college doesn’t deliver on those promises. At a quarter of American colleges, the majority of students who got federal financial aid end up earning less than $25,000 per year a full decade after they first enrolled.That startling statistic comes from an unprecedented trove of data released Saturday by the White House. The Education Department and Treasury Department combined forces to link a huge database of all students who got Pell Grants or student loans since 1996 with their income tax records, producing the clearest picture ever of how students who received federal financial aid fared in college and after.”

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Check out the NGPF Lesson on Comparing Sticker Prices and Net Prices for College

About the Author

Tim Ranzetta

Tim's saving habits started at seven when a neighbor with a broken hip gave him a dog walking job. Her recovery, which took almost a year, resulted in Tim getting to know the bank tellers quite well (and accumulating a savings account balance of over $300!). His recent entrepreneurial adventures have included driving a shredding truck, analyzing executive compensation packages for Fortune 500 companies and helping families make better college financing decisions. After volunteering in 2010 to create and teach a personal finance program at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, Tim saw firsthand the impact of an engaging and activity-based curriculum, which inspired him to start a new non-profit, Next Gen Personal Finance.