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IHEP Celebrates Updates to the College Scorecard to Better Equip Students to Make Higher Ed Choices and Policymakers to Promote Equity-Driven Policies  

Washington, DC (February 7, 2022)  – Today, the U.S. Department of Education announced updates to the  College Scorecard to provide more useful information to students and families, as well as colleges, universities, researchers, and policymakers. Today’s updates include several key recommendations from the Postsecondary Data Collaborative , including the addition of institution-level earnings; median earnings disaggregated by income, gender, and dependency status; share of former students earning more than a typical high school graduate; and refreshed cumulative debt data. In response to these important changes, IHEP’s president and CEO,  Mamie Voight , issued the following statement:

“Deciding where to go to college is one of the most important decisions of a student’s life, and today’s updates to the College Scorecard give students a practical tool to help them make that decision. The updates include several critical changes that will provide all interested parties with the information they need to ensure higher education is the pathway to a better living and a better life that it should be for all students, regardless of race, background, or circumstance. We sincerely appreciate the Department of Education’s recognition that higher education should be affordable and inclusive and provide strong outcomes for students.

“These changes, including increased visibility into workforce outcomes and appropriate contextual information, promote transparency at a crucial time for our country and for our students. COVID-19 disruptions have further complicated students’ college decision processes, making clear, reliable information about the return they can expect from their investment all the more critical.

“The College Scorecard plays a vital role in keeping students informed about their college options, both through their own use of the online tool as well as through researchers’ and developers’ applications and analyses of underlying data. Quality, complete data are also essential to help institutions and policymakers ensure programs, policies, and investments deliver valuable outcomes to all students.

“The Department of Education has made great strides toward the transparent postsecondary data our country needs with this revised edition of the College Scorecard. Now, we call on Congress to act to pass the College Transparency Act, which would strengthen the information available to students even further.”

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Helping Students Make More Informed College Choices at Department of Education

The challenge.

For students, higher education may be the single most important investment they can make in their futures to ensure they have the knowledge and skills needed to compete in an increasingly global marketplace. College is the surest path to becoming part of America’s middle class and for this reason, selecting a college is an incredibly important decision for many people. But, many potential college students and their families do not have the advisors or resources to help them find a college that will serve them well.

With college costs and student debt on the rise, the choices that American families make when searching for and selecting a college have never been more important. Yet, students and the organizations that serve them struggle to find clear, reliable, and comparable data on critical questions of college affordability and value, such as whether they are likely to graduate, find middle-class jobs, and repay their loans. At a time when America needs colleges to focus on ensuring affordability and supporting all students who enroll, many of the existing college rankings instead reward schools for spending more money and rejecting more students. Additionally, college leaders and state policymakers who seek to improve institutions’ performance often lack reliable ways to determine how well their schools are serving students.

To address this challenge, the Department of Education sought to redesign the College Scorecard .

Project Impact Summary

• The USDS team at the Department of Education, with help from 18F, launched the College Scorecard to help students and their families make more informed choices about where to go to school.
• The Scorecard makes comprehensive data on college costs, graduation rates, graduate debt, repayment rates, and post-college earnings accessible to help students choose a school based on access, affordability and outcomes.
• The project drew on hundreds of interviews with students, parents and guidance counselors to ensure that the product would fit their needs.
• In its first two weeks, College Scorecard attracted over 850,000 unique users, a major uptick from the 160,000 who used the prior version of the tool the entire year before.
• The project opened the data to the public and made an API available specifically for third-party developers to build more applications to help students and policymakers. More than a dozen organizations have built new tools using this data.
• Google has now integrated College Scorecard data so that it shows up front and center in the results of hundreds of millions of education-related searches.

The Solution

The new College Scorecard was redesigned with direct input from students, families, and their advisers to provide the clearest, most accessible, and most reliable national data on college costs, graduation rates, and post-college earnings. This new College Scorecard can empower Americans to rate colleges based on what matters most to them; enable policymakers and the public to highlight colleges that are serving students of all backgrounds well; and focus greater attention on making a quality, affordable education within reach. The new tool for assessing college choices, with the help of technology and open data, makes it possible for anyone—a student, a school, a policymaker, or a researcher—to evaluate an institution on the factors that matter most to them.

The public can now access the most reliable and comprehensive data on students’ outcomes at specific colleges, including former students’ earnings, graduates’ student debt, and borrowers’ repayment rates. This data is published through an open application programming interface (API), enabling researchers, policymakers, and developers to customize their own analyses of college performance more quickly and easily.

More than a dozen organizations are using this data to build new tools. For example, Scholar Match, Propublica, and College Abacus—three college search resources—are using the new, unique data to help students search for, compare, and develop a list of colleges based on the outcomes data that the Department of Education made available for the first time through an API. InsideTrack, comprised of a team of coaches and consultants working to improve student outcomes by helping students find the institutions that are right for them, uses the data to develop and implement effective student-centered initiatives.

The Department of Education plans to continue releasing new College Scorecard data and promoting use of these new access, affordability and outcome metrics.

Success Criteria

• April 2015: Project Start Date.
• July 2015: Code Start Date.
• September 2015: Go-Live Date.
• May 2016: USDS Project End Date.
• September 2016: New data released to Scorecard. All data indexed and searchable.

The Process and Lessons Learned

• Understand what people need. USDS, Ed, and 18F built College Scorecard by working with users at every stage of the project to find out how they made decisions about college. The team met with students (both high school and adult), parents, guidance counselors and advisors, open data users, and people who wrote to the President about their college search experiences. Long before the first line of software code was written, the team was working with students, testing paper prototypes to make sure they were as easy-to-use as possible.

Getting feedback on a paper prototype of the new College Scorecard.

Build services using agile and iterative processes. The Department of Education built the College Scorecard using agile development methodology. To deliver the right product — what students actually need — as efficiently as possible, the team built the new College Scorecard using an approach that allowed the team to work in short iterations, and to test, scale, and design the tool with a process that could adapt to changes in technology and user needs. The team maintained a project rhythm of two week iterations, with daily stand up meetings to coordinate progress.

Run a developer beta. USDS ran a beta specifically for developers — giving them a chance to test the data and documentation and flag opportunities to make it even easier to use. The feedback from the developers made it possible to release the data in a way that led to easy re-use by third parties.

Launch a minimum viable product (MVP). The team focused on launching a MVP, building the right products to meet customer needs as efficiently as possible. This approach allowed the project to launch with less than 3 months of development time. The team built the project mobile-first and focused on the most critical feature set and information that each user type advocated for.

Release open data, and build services using the same APIs offered to the public. Rather than focusing solely on creating a user-facing website, the team also created documentation for, and released, open data for over 7,300 colleges and universities, going back 18 years. This made it possible for third-parties to incorporate the data into their own products and tools, increasing the chance that the information makes it to users wherever and whenever they might be looking for it.

To make it easier for third parties to integrate this data, Department of Education published an API . This API serves both as the engine for the College Scorecard itself as well as a source for external software developers or researchers who want to use the data in their own digital products. The College Scorecard effort is one of the first government digital services that not only releases open data, but also builds a user-facing tool on top of the very same API it provides to the public. This is a common practice used by American’s best technology companies.

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U.S. Department of Education Launches College Scorecard

Please note, this content may be outdated. Visit Study in the States'  Students , Schools and Blog pages for more timely information on this topic.

The U.S. Department of Education has partnered with the White House to launch College Scorecard, a tool to help prospective students and their families find information on colleges and universities in the United States.

You can use the scorecard tool to search for schools by name, location, size, campus setting, degree and major. After you input your desired criteria, the scorecard will provide a list of schools that may be right for you. A school’s scorecard also will show important information about the schools:

• Typical costs to attend the school
• Graduation rates
• Average loan amounts for students
• Types of jobs students obtain after graduation

Remember that an F or M student may only enroll in a school that is Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP)-certified to enroll F and/or M students. If you have questions about program costs at the school you want to attend, talk to a designated school official at the school.

For more information, visit  the Score Card and compare your results with the list of SEVP-certified schools. You can also reference the Department of Education’s College Navigator tool to build a list of schools for side-by-side comparisons.

• Obama Administration Launches College Scorecard, Department of Education

United States Department of Education: Launching the College Scorecard, a Digital Service

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Abstract The goal of the case is to understand how to design, build, and engage with digital technologies as they relate to civic participation, equity, governance, and accountability. Delivering critical services to the public requires building technology that works for people. In environments like the public sector, this can be a challenge, but it is possible and necessary. Students will learn how product managers set strategy, define products, advocate for the user, manage stakeholders, and understand market or policy factors in order to ship technology services and products that benefit people.

In 2015, the Obama Administration asked a cross-governmental team to reimagine the College Scorecard, a website to assist high school students with their college decisions. This team consisted of the United States Digital Service (which fell under the Executive Office of the President), 18F (which fell under the General Services Administration), and the Department of Education. The team, whose members had diverse skillsets and backgrounds, understood the problem by conducting a thorough discovery sprint. This helped them understand users, particularly high school students from different backgrounds, parents, guidance counselors, and other stakeholder groups. The team then continuously engaged users as they built the product, working across three different government entities to get a digital product launched. Team members interviewed for this case included: Holly Allen, Lisa Gelobter, Michelle Hertzfeld, Jessica Teal, Sabrina Williams, David Nesting.

Learning Objectives 1. Understand how government can use human-centered approaches to develop digital products for the public good. 2. Identify key challenges, including bureaucracy and politics, in product development. 3. Understand product management concepts: discovery sprints, user experience research, agile, metrics, product roadmap, feature prioritization, design trade-offs, and stakeholder management.

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College Scorecard: Postsecondary Data for Education Seekers

To disseminate data to postsecondary education seekers, providing them critical information around access, affordability, and college outcomes.

RTI International constructed a dataset that combines data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS), the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and others and built a user-friendly website to help postsecondary education seekers access these data. The team also built an Application Programming Interface (API) that enables third-party developers to use the Scorecard data in their own applications and analyses.

With an average of 105,000 unique monthly visitors, College Scorecard is one of the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED’s) most visited websites. RTI is continuing to update and improve the Scorecard to benefit more users, provide more features, and make the website and API more responsive and accessible. 

Giving Postsecondary Education Seekers the Data They Need to Make Informed Decisions

Postsecondary education seekers have many decisions to make about continuing their education after high school. How can they access the data they need on key factors like available fields of study, costs, student and faculty demographics, and more to help inform their decisions? 

College Scorecard is an easy-to-use website created by ED that provides college and certificate seekers a wealth of postsecondary data in a user-friendly interface. This flagship data dissemination website combines information from IPEDS with data from NSLDS, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and other sources to produce a historical dataset from 1996 to the present. 

Screenshot of the College Scorecard Search function.

RTI is helping ED update and maintain the Scorecard, processing large amounts of complex data and turning them into actionable insights. The team also developed one of ED’s first public APIs, which enables developers and data scientists to use machine-readable data from College Scorecard and incorporate that data into their own website or use the data as part of their statistical analysis. This enables third-party developers to provide this free information to their users and allows researchers to use the data to examine college choice.

Through our partnership with ED, we are developing user-friendly ways to sift through institutional characteristics (such as enrollment data and student aid) so that prospective students can easily discover pathways into their desired careers and learn how they can pay for their education. 

Developing a Modern, Accessible Education Data Dashboard

College Scorecard is mobile-responsive, accessible, and user friendly, helping users make data-driven decisions about their postsecondary education. Rather than looking at raw data, users can interact with select data visualizations on the Scorecard that ED has engaged with the various targeted audiences and determined to be the most important when it comes to “finding the right fit.” 

Merging data from several sources to build one dataset and website was a complex process. Since 2015, RTI has developed, tested, and refined a series of programs that harmonize the data from across all sources and ultimately merge all the data into the Scorecard data files, which are shared with the public and disseminated through the API. 

College Scorecard merges data from multiple sources.

RTI used user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) tools, along with user testing and strategic outreach, to develop and display comparison data in a way that was easy to digest for the various College Scorecard audiences. 

User testing is core to the development and implementation of the Scorecard. This testing involves recruiting test users to click around and test the functionality of the platform using wireframes prior to programming. These users give feedback to ensure that the data are easy to understand and accessible before they are implemented on the consumer-facing website. Based on this feedback, RTI provides ED with recommendations for what features and functionality should be implemented.

Supporting the Evolution of College Scorecard for Better Decision-Making

Given that the College Scorecard website is free and open access, it has been a tremendous resource for postsecondary decision making. The Scorecard is one of ED’s most visited pages, receiving on average 105,000 unique monthly visitors. In addition, the API has enabled users to build their own websites and apps and multiply the impact of the Scorecard. 

In addition to supporting updates to Scorecard data, the RTI team is supporting design and feature updates for the consumer website. We are always trying to evolve and improve the Scorecard to benefit more users; provide more options; and make the website and API more useful, responsive, and accessible. As part of the feedback process, the team has emphasized making the website approachable to students and underrepresented populations and ensuring that it is easy to view from mobile devices and desktops. We are continuing to work with ED to identify future improvements to the website and API to disseminate Scorecard data better and help postsecondary seekers get the data they need to make decisions about their future.

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USF College of Education continues to rise in rankings for top graduate programs by U.S. News & World Report

• April 9, 2024
• College of Education News

The University of South Florida (USF) College of Education is once again recognized for its graduate education programs and has climbed five spots to no. 38 for public universities in the 2024 rankings released today by U.S. News and World Report. Several factors are evaluated in ranking the 255 education institutions including faculty credentials, admissions and graduation rates and research activity.

Dr. R. Anthony Rolle, Dean of the College of Education remarked, “The faculty, staff, and students in the USF College of Education – along with its vibrant and innovative instructional, research, and community partners – are quite excited to learn that when U.S. News & World Report compared us to our outstanding peer public colleges of education across the U.S. that USF is ranked #38! And, among all peer colleges of education nationally, we are ranked #48. As dean of this college, I must say that I am extremely proud of the work efforts conducted by all involved. This college is an example for what can happen when a college is mission-focused on creating academic, economic, and social justice service opportunities for all its professional communities.”

The College of Education offers more than 45 masters and doctoral degree programs across numerous areas of study, such as curriculum and instruction, instructional technology, educational leadership, exercise science and school psychology. USF’s graduate education programs prepare students for careers in various settings, including PK-12 teaching, school administration, higher education, educational policy, research and curriculum development. 

Home to seven research institutions, our master’s and doctoral students turn their research into innovation that benefits students, educators, businesses, and the community – both locally and globally.

For more information about the U.S. News and World Report's Best Graduate Education Programs rankings, visit the U.S. News and World Report website . 

About the USF College of Education: Home to more than 2,600 students and 130 faculty members, the University of South Florida College of Education values high-quality education and excellence in research, teaching and learning. The College of Education is nationally accredited by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) and its educator preparation programs are fully approved by the Florida Department of Education.

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About the USF College of Education:

As the home for more than 2,200 students and 130 faculty members across three campuses, the University of South Florida College of Education offers state-of-the-art teacher training and collegial graduate studies designed to empower educational leaders. Our college is nationally accredited by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), and our educator preparation programs are fully approved by the Florida Department of Education.

College of Education grad program ranks in Top 40 among U.S. public universities

The Purdue University College of Education ranks #48 in 2024 Best Education Schools – Graduate  Education , according to the 2024 U.S. News & World Report rankings released Apr. 9. This is an increase from #49 in 2023.

Education is among the five top-ranked academic disciplines at Purdue ranked by the USNWR .

“We are #2 in Indiana, and in the top 19% nationally,” said Wayne E. Wright , College of Education associate dean for research, graduate programs, and faculty development.

This ranking places Purdue’s College of Education graduate program in the Top 40 among U.S. public universities, at #37.

“While this is a very small improvement over our ranking last year, it is evidence that our graduate programs are strengthening — especially in the area of research,” said Phillip J. VanFossen , interim dean of the College. “In fact, the College has one of the highest levels of research productivity at Purdue.”

“We are thrilled to see our graduate program move even higher in the 2024 U.S. News and World Report Rankings,” Wright said. “We truly have outstanding programs and faculty who are dedicated to teaching and providing our students with highest quality education.”

U.S. News & World Report is a recognized leader in ranking colleges, programs, and graduate schools. Each year, Purdue’s College of Education strives to continually improve its programs and relies on the rankings to help promote and serve as a recruiting tool for prospective students seeking a quality online educational experience.

U.S. News and World Report rankings of the 2024 Best Graduate Schools – Education programs https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-education-schools/purdue-university-main-campus-06068   

Source: Wayne E. Wright, [email protected]

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College of Education graduate programs receive high marks in latest national rankings

Fifty University of Iowa colleges and programs were recognized among the best in their field in the   U.S. News   &   World Report   Best Graduate Schools rankings for 2025. Ten UI programs, including the College of Education’s  Rehabilitation Counseling program , which is ranked third, are ranked in the top 10.

An accredited master’s program, Rehabilitation Counseling prepares graduates for careers serving persons with emotional and physical disabilities through counseling, human resources, advocacy, leadership, case management, life care planning, forensic rehabilitation, corrections, consultation, private and public service. 

The college received an overall ranking of 30 (up from No. 36) and an additional two of its graduate programs were nationally ranked in the top 25 by U.S. News & World Report : Student Counseling (No. 11; up from its previous ranking of No. 12) and  Higher Education Administration (No. 22).

The University of Iowa as a whole continues to excel, with 23 total colleges and programs ranked among the top 25 in the nation.

Click here to read the entire article , which includes a list of all 72 UI colleges and programs as ranked by U.S. News & World Report.