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The College Scorecard is a free US Department of Education tool that publishes standardized data on every college that receives federal student aid. For each school it shows the net price by income band, median earnings of graduates, median debt, and graduation and admission rates. Because the numbers are collected the same way for every college, it's built for honest side-by-side comparison, which the colleges' own marketing is not.
The College Scorecard is a public website and open dataset run by the US Department of Education. It exists to give students and families outcome data they can trust and compare, drawn from federal records rather than from what each college chooses to advertise. Any college that participates in federal student aid programs is in it, which is nearly all of them.
Yes. There's no login, no paywall and no cost to look up any college. The full dataset is also published openly, which is what lets independent tools, including this one, build on it.
The Scorecard's value is that it standardizes a handful of numbers that actually predict cost and outcome. The most useful fields:
| Field | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Average net price by income | What families in each of five income bands actually paid after grants, not the sticker. |
| Median earnings | Typical earnings of former students years after they entered, from federal tax records. |
| Median debt | The typical federal loan debt students leave with. |
| Graduation rate | The share of students who complete their degree, because a degree not finished still costs. |
| Admission rate | How selective the college is, useful for judging whether it's a reach or a likely. |
The net price by income field is the one that changes decisions most, because it exposes how far real cost falls below the sticker and by how much it differs across families. For the full contrast, see sticker price vs net price.
The Scorecard doesn't guess. Net price is built from colleges' own reporting of what students paid after grants. Median debt comes from federal student aid records. Median earnings come from tax data on former students, which is why they're grounded in what people actually earned rather than a survey. Graduation and admission rates come from the colleges' federal enrollment reporting. Because every school feeds the same federal systems the same way, the fields are directly comparable, which is the property that makes the Scorecard useful and college brochures useless for comparison.
The catch when comparing by hand. The Scorecard shows one college at a time. Weighing four schools means opening four profiles, reading five fields on each, matching income bands and building your own table. That's the tedious step, and it's exactly where a side-by-side report saves the effort.
The inputs are strong: colleges' own federal reporting, federal financial aid records and, for earnings, tax data. Standardization makes it excellent for comparison. The honest limits: every figure reflects a specific past reporting year, so it lags the present; and net price is an income-band average, not a prediction of your personal aid. Read it as a well-grounded basis for comparison and a shortlist tool, then confirm your real number with each college's Net Price Calculator and aid letter.
Honest caveat. Scorecard figures are averages from the government's most recent reporting year, not a personal quote. This site is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by the Department of Education. This is information, not financial advice.
Our report does the side-by-side step for you: it pulls each college's Scorecard net price by income, earnings, debt and graduation into one sheet. See our methodology for the exact fields and how they're sourced, or read how financial aid works to understand how that net price is produced.
Figures are US Dept of Education averages from the latest reporting year, not a personal aid quote.
