Why Scorecard Earnings Cover Only Federal-Aid Recipients
The legal and practical reason
College Scorecard earnings are built by matching education records to federal tax information for students whose enrolment is visible in federal systems — overwhelmingly, students who received federal financial aid such as Pell Grants or federal loans. Students who paid entirely without federal aid do not pass through those systems in the same way, so they are not in the earnings cohort. This is not a sampling choice the Department made for convenience in a survey; it is a consequence of which administrative records exist and may lawfully be linked. Understanding that single fact prevents the most common misreading of every figure on this site.
Who that population is
Federal-aid recipients are, on average, less wealthy than the full student body, and at some colleges they are a minority of the class while at others they are nearly everyone. Their earnings after college reflect both the college's effect and the starting resources, networks and constraints they brought with them. When a highly resourced college posts a high median, part of that figure describes its students' advantages before and beyond college; when a broad-access college posts a lower one, part describes the population it exists to serve. The figures remain comparable as measurements — the mistake is reading them as pure report cards on teaching, stripped of intake.
How the bias cuts in comparisons
Between two colleges with similar intakes, aid-cohort earnings compare cleanly. Between a college where aid recipients are 90 percent of students and one where they are 25 percent, the same statistic describes different slices, and the gap between colleges will overstate the gap in what the colleges themselves contribute. Sophisticated readers therefore pair earnings with intake context — admission rate, net price by income where published, Pell share — and with completion, which is reported on a broader cohort basis. Our profiles keep admission and completion on the same page as earnings for exactly this reason: the context is not decoration, it is part of the measurement.
What this does not mean
It does not mean the figures are rigged, useless or incomparable in principle — they are the most standardised outcome evidence in American higher education, built from administrative records rather than self-reported surveys with single-digit response rates. It also does not mean a college's full-pay students earn the same as its aid cohort; at many colleges they will earn more on average, for reasons of background as much as education. The honest position is narrower: these medians describe aid recipients at a defined point, they do so consistently across colleges, and decisions improve when you use them as defined instead of as the alumni-salary figures marketing wishes they were.
Asking the follow-up questions
When a college's aid cohort is small, ask the college what share of students receive federal aid and whether it publishes outcomes for its full class, and by what method. When its median looks exceptional, ask which programmes drive it and check the field-of-study figures. When it looks weak, ask about graduate-school progression, which removes students from early earnings measurement, and about regional wages. The Scorecard's population definition, properly understood, turns you into a better questioner of every other number a college shows you — including the ones in its own viewbook, which rarely define their populations at all.
Further reading: return to the Learn index, apply these definitions in the college profiles and field pages, or read the full methodology for sources, files and suppression rules.
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.