Methodology
Every number in your report comes from the US Dept of Education College Scorecard, the government's public dataset on American colleges. Here is exactly what we pull, how we match your colleges to it, and what each figure does and does not mean, so you can trust the comparison and know where its edges are.
You type college names in plain English. We resolve each one to its main campus in the Scorecard before pulling anything, so "Michigan" lands on the University of Michigan's Ann Arbor campus and not a branch or a similarly named school. When a name is ambiguous, we match the largest degree-granting main campus that fits, which is almost always the one families mean.
The centerpiece is net price: the cost of attendance minus the average grant and scholarship aid students receive. The Scorecard reports net price broken out by family income band, so we read the figure for the band you selected. For public colleges the reported figure is for in-state students, since that is how public net price is published; for private colleges it is reported across all students. We pull whichever the school reports, and the report notes which is which.
Alongside net price we show the published cost of attendance, the full sticker before any aid. Setting these two side by side is the whole point: it shows how far the real cost falls below the list price, and how often a college that looks expensive on paper is cheaper in practice than a state school.
For each college we pull median earnings ten years after students first entered, the median debt of students who borrowed, the graduation rate, and the admission rate. Price alone doesn't tell you whether a degree is worth it, so the report puts cost next to what graduates typically earn, what they typically owe, how many actually finish, and how selective the school is.
Your colleges are ranked by net price for your income band, lowest first. On top of the ranking, the report flags the single lowest net price on your list and the strongest earnings-to-debt ratio, so the best-value option stands out instead of hiding in a row of numbers.
What net price is, and what it is not. Net price is an average for the most recent year the government reports, for families in a given income band. It is the number that actually decides affordability, far more useful than the sticker, but it is an average, not a personal quote. Your own aid offer depends on your full financial picture and can come in above or below the figure shown. The right way to use the report is to compare colleges and decide which deserve an application, then get your exact cost from each college's net price calculator and, once you apply, your FAFSA and aid letters. This is not financial advice.
