Data sources and methodology
Everything on this site comes from public files published by the U.S. Department of Education. We do not survey colleges, estimate missing values or rank schools. When a college did not report a figure, the page leaves it out.
Sources
- College Scorecard
- Most Recent Cohorts institution file and field-of-study file, updated November 2, 2026(collegescorecard.ed.gov/data). Used for tuition and fees, cost of attendance, net price, test policy and score ranges, earnings, debt, graduation and retention rates, and pay by program.
- IPEDS admissions
- Applications, admissions and enrollment for each fall term from 2001 to 2024, as reported by each college to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and published by theUrban Institute Education Data Portal.
- IPEDS tuition history
- Published tuition and required fees for full-time undergraduates, academic years 2014-15 to 2023-24, from the same portal. The 2025-26 figure comes from the College Scorecard.
Which year each figure describes
The federal files are released on different schedules, so the figures on one page do not all describe the same year. Each page names the year next to the number.
| Figure | Period |
|---|---|
| Acceptance rate, applications, admissions, enrollment | Fall 2024 entering class (series from fall 2001) |
| Tuition and fees | 2025-26 |
| Cost of attendance, net price | Most recent year in the College Scorecard; usually one to two years behind tuition |
| Earnings ten years after enrolling | Students who started college roughly 15 years ago, measured a decade later and adjusted for inflation |
| Pay by program | Bachelor's graduates from the mid to late 2010s; the one-year and four-year figures use different pairs of pooled graduating classes |
| Median debt at graduation | Federal loans of students who completed, recent pooled cohorts |
Definitions
- Acceptance rate
- Admitted first-time, first-year applicants divided by all such applicants for the fall term. Transfer applicants are not included.
- Enrolled
- Admitted students who enrolled that fall, full and part time. Enrolled divided by admitted is often called the yield.
- Net price
- The average cost of attendance minus grants and scholarships for first-time, full-time undergraduates who received federal aid. Public colleges report it for students paying the in-state rate. Income bands are household income.
- Cost of attendance
- Tuition and fees, books and supplies, and living costs for a full academic year, as estimated by the college.
- Earnings
- Median earnings of former students who were working and not enrolled in school. Ten-year figures include students who did not graduate.
- Program pay
- Median earnings of bachelor's graduates of one program (grouped by four-digit CIP code). The Department of Education suppresses programs with too few graduates to protect privacy, so smaller majors do not appear.
Comparisons
National reference values are medians over the 1,935 currently operating colleges that award mainly bachelor's degrees (1,579 of them report an acceptance rate). The median acceptance rate is77%, the median in-state tuition at public colleges $10,300, and the median tuition at private nonprofit colleges $35,915.
Similar colleges are picked from that same group: same control (public or private nonprofit), an acceptance rate within 12 points, and an undergraduate enrollment between 0.4 and 2.5 times as large. Among those, the closest on acceptance rate, enrollment and net price come first, with a small preference for colleges in the same state. It is a way to find comparable schools, not a ranking.
What these pages do not do
We do not predict anyone's chance of admission and we do not rank colleges. Federal figures can differ from what a college publishes on its own site, because of timing and definitions. Before you apply or decide, check the college's admissions and financial aid office and its net price calculator.
Updates and coverage
This first version covers 50 colleges. The data is refreshed when the College Scorecard and IPEDS publish new files, usually a few times a year. Last data build: 2026-11-10.