The White House last month unveiled its College Scorecard, a database that allows users to evaluate and compare colleges and universities in the United States based on factors such as cost, graduation rate and salary after attending.
“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,” the White House said in announcing the scorecard, CollegeScorecard.ed.gov.
The scorecard, however, is a retreat from a plan announced by President Barack Obama in 2013 for the federal government to rate the quality of colleges and universities, an effort envisioned as going beyond existing ranking systems like that of U.S. News & World Report.
“What we want to do is rate them on who’s offering the best value so students and taxpayers get a bigger bang for their buck,” Obama said at the time.
That plan met harsh criticism from higher education officials, who questioned whether the government could make fair comparisons between vastly different colleges and universities — public, private, nonprofit, for-profit, those with a liberal arts focus, those emphasizing business, science or engineering.
The College Scorecard that debuted last month examines more than 7,000 institutions of higher learning. It contains “the first-ever comprehensive and reliable data on post-college earnings for students who attended all types of undergraduate institutions, based upon tax records.” The scorecard bases its “salary after attending” category on the median earnings of students 10 years after college enrollment.
The full results and a treasure trove of other data can be found at CollegeScorecard.ed.gov.
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