Research Tools: U.S. Department of Education Unveils New “College Scorecard” Database

From a White House Fact Sheet:

• A new College Scorecard – at CollegeScorecard.ed.gov – redesigned with direct input from students, families, and their advisers to provide the clearest, most accessible, and most reliable national data on college cost, graduation, debt, and post-college earnings.

• New, comprehensive and updated data on higher education institutions. For the first time, the public can access the most reliable and comprehensive data on students’ outcomes at specific colleges, including former students’ earnings, graduates’ student debt, and borrowers’ repayment rates. These data are also available for various sub-groups, like first-generation and Pell students.  Because these data will be published through an open application programming interface (API), researchers, policymakers, and members of the public can customize their own analysis of college performance more quickly and easily.

• Customized tools for students, with 11 organizations already using these data to launch new tools. Today, ScholarMatchStartClass and College Abacus, three college search resources, are using this new, unique data that help students search for, compare, and develop a list of colleges based on the outcomes data that the Department is making available to the public for the first time. PayScale, which offers consumers a large salary database, will use the new data to analyze various colleges’ return-on-investment for different student groups while InsideTrack, which is a team of coaches and consultants working to improve student outcomes, will use the data to develop and implement effective student-centered initiatives. ProPublica, a non-profit investigative journalism newsroom, has built a tool with the open data to help consumers make more informed decisions.

Much more about the database in the Complete Fact Sheet
Direct to College Scorecard Database
See Also: Learn More About the Data, Download the Complete Dataset
See Also:Under the Hood: Building a New College Scorecard with Students (via U.S. Department of Education)

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