Teachin'Mine Posted September 12, 2015 Share Posted September 12, 2015 The Dept of Education has put out this site for searching for colleges and comparing them on several issues. It's actually user friendly and informative. https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teachin'Mine Posted September 12, 2015 Author Share Posted September 12, 2015 Has anyone played with this? When searching for specific programs, I'm not understanding what determines the order of the colleges listed. Any idea? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teachin'Mine Posted September 12, 2015 Author Share Posted September 12, 2015 Yes it may be a work in progress. My question is that when you pull up programs and degrees and enter a specific program without further sorting, what determines the order of colleges listed? I know that you can further sort for graduation rate or salary, but what puts the colleges on the first page there as opposed to elsewhere. I'm doing some searching. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matryoshka Posted September 12, 2015 Share Posted September 12, 2015 Yes it may be a work in progress. My question is that when you pull up programs and degrees and enter a specific program without further sorting, what determines the order of colleges listed? I know that you can further sort for graduation rate or salary, but what puts the colleges on the first page there as opposed to elsewhere. I'm doing some searching. I saw that today just before it was posted here. One thing the article I read mentioned is that they were planning to use the data to rank colleges, but they couldn't figure out the best way to do it, so they just decided to put the raw data out there. So there may be no meaning to the order. I haven't looked that much - is it by any chance just alphabetical? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teachin'Mine Posted September 12, 2015 Author Share Posted September 12, 2015 Good thought, but it's not alphabetical. When you put in engineering, for instance, Harvard and Fairfield are both on the first page, neither of which are the first schools to pop into my mind for being tops in engineering. (US News ranks Harvard as #20 for graduate program in engineering and Fairfield isn't listed. I have no idea if they have a graduate program, but they do have undergraduate.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JanetC Posted September 13, 2015 Share Posted September 13, 2015 I'm always skeptical about ranking colleges based on earnings -- places with a high percentage of engineering majors always rank highest since engineering salaries are so much higher than for humanities grads. What I'd like to know is how to tease out which schools do the best job of preparing liberal arts type majors for the working world, and it's really hard to tease out the majors from the data. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teachin'Mine Posted September 13, 2015 Author Share Posted September 13, 2015 Yes, it seems that they decided against ranking the colleges and are just presenting the financial informaiton and graduation rates and letting that information help guide students and families in their choices. I like that the salary is based only on students who received federal financial aid, so I'm assuming Pell recipients. When the average salary 10 years after graduation includes all students, it can be a bit skewed as some of the highest SES students will have the family and connections for very high earnings. I wish that they could further break down the amount paid for college based on those who received a Pell grant. Some students going into college have retired parents, so their income is close to nothing, but that doesn't present the whole picture as they may have huge investments and savings. So the number for families earning less than 30K isn't what a low income student would likely pay. Just a breakdown of that and the next higher income level would make the info even more relevant and helpful to lower income students. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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