The U.S. Department of Education’s revamped College Scorecard website celebrated its third anniversary last month with another update to the underlying dataset. It is good to see this important consumer information tool continue to be updated, given the role that Scorecard data can play in market-based accountability (a key goal of many conservatives). But the Scorecard’s change log—a great resource for those using the dataset—revealed a few changes to the public-facing site. (Thanks to the indefatigable Clare McCann at New America for pointing this out in a blog post.)
So to put the above screenshot into plain English, the Scorecard used to have indicators for how a college’s performance on outcomes such as net price, graduation rate, and post-college salary compared to the median institution—and now it doesn’t. In many ways, the Department of Education’s decision to stop comparing colleges with different levels of selectivity and institutional resources to each other makes all the sense in the world. But it would be helpful to provide website users with a general idea of how the college performs relative to more similar institutions (without requiring users to enter a list of comparison colleges).
For example, here is what the Scorecard data now look like for Cal State—Sacramento (the closest college to me as I write this post). The university sure looks affordable, but the context is missing.
It would sure be helpful if ED already had a mechanism to generate a halfway reasonable set of comparison institutions to help put federal higher education data into context. Hold on just a second…
It turns out that there is already an option within the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to generate a list of peer institutions. ED creates a list of similar institutions to the focal college based on factors such as sector and level, Carnegie classification, enrollment, and geographic region. For Sacramento State, here is part of the list of 32 comparison institutions that is generated. People can certainly quibble with some of the institutions chosen, but they clearly do have some similarities.
I then graphed the net prices of these 32 institutions to help put Sacramento State (in black below) into context. They had the fifth-lowest net price among the set of universities, information that is at least somewhat more helpful than looking at a national average across all sectors and levels.
My takeaway here: the folks behind the College Scorecard should talk with the IPEDS people to consider bringing back a comparison group average based on a methodology that is already used within the Department of Education.
Robert Kelchen 