About College Outcomes Data
Our Editorial Team
College Outcomes Data is produced by the College Outcomes Data Editorial Team, a small editorial group that works exclusively with published federal education statistics. The team's job is not to rank colleges for entertainment or to sell placement to institutions — no college can pay to be included, excluded, reordered or described more favourably on this site — but to present the outcome measures families actually need in the combinations that make them honest. Every page on this site carries the team's byline and a last-updated stamp, and every figure carries its source, because anonymous, undated, unsourced statistics are how families get misled.
Why this site exists
The information problem in college choice is not scarcity; it is separation. Earnings are quoted by marketers, prices by bursars, completion by accreditors and debt by lenders, and the family is left to assemble the picture at the kitchen table. Yet the three decisive facts about a college outcome — what graduates earn, what they owe, and how many of them graduated at all — are published by the federal government in a single dataset, free, for nearly every institution in the country. This site exists to keep those facts together: no earnings figure appears here without debt and completion beside it, and where one of the three is not published, the page says so instead of filling the gap.
Methodology in brief
Our full methodology is published on the methodology page. In brief: institution figures come from the College Scorecard institution-level file (Most-Recent-Cohorts-Institution) in the October 15, 2026 release (Most-Recent-Cohorts files, data vintage as published in that release), retrieved October 2026, using median earnings ten years after entry for federal-aid recipients, median graduate debt, and completion at 150 percent of normal time. Programme figures come from the companion field-of-study file, using bachelor's programmes, earnings at the four-year point and programme debt medians. Benchmark medians quoted on profiles are calculated by this site across the 1,495 predominantly bachelor's institutions in the release reporting all three headline measures. Privacy-suppressed values are treated as missing, always.
What we are not
We are not a college, an admissions consultancy, a lender or a lead generator. We do not sell student data, accept advertising from institutions we profile, or offer personalised financial advice; the figures here are cohort medians for comparison, and decisions about a specific family's borrowing belong with that family and, where needed, a qualified adviser who knows their full circumstances. We are a publisher of public data, organised around a single editorial conviction: that a family shown earnings, debt and completion together, with definitions it can understand, will make a better decision than a family shown any one of them alone, however beautifully presented.
Corrections
When the Department of Education issues a new release, figures change, and pages are regenerated and restamped. If you believe a figure on this site does not match the source file for the stated release, contact us through the contact page with the page, the figure and the source value; verified errors are corrected and the correction is the kind of thing we would rather hear about than not. Colleges that have changed names, merged or closed since the cohort period should expect the historical record to describe the institution as the data records it.
Note on this data: Figures on this page come from the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard release retrieved in October 2026. Earnings cover students who received federal financial aid and were working and not enrolled at the measurement point; they are medians for a defined past cohort, not a promise of what any individual graduate will earn. Check the college and the Scorecard for the most current figures before you decide.