College Finder
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Methodology

What users need to know about the data

College Finder is built from official College Scorecard bulk files. The site keeps source, cohort, missing-data, and ranking caveats visible so users do not mistake filtered lists for official rankings.

Metric caveats

“Latest” fields can come from different source years. Net price, graduation, retention, debt, and earnings are cohort-based measures.

Institution-level earnings and field-of-study earnings describe different cohorts and should not be compared directly.

Ranking caveats

Missing, null, and privacy-suppressed values are not zero. Lists are filtered views, not official rankings or endorsements.

Metric-sorted pages exclude schools without the metric being sorted. No list combines multiple measures into a composite score.

Plain-English definitions

Definitions shown inline across data-heavy pages.

Average net price
Average annual price after grant and scholarship aid for the relevant reporting cohort. It is not a personal aid estimate.
Graduation rate
A cohort-based completion measure that may not describe transfer, part-time, adult, or nontraditional students.
Admission rate
The share of applicants admitted. It is not a personal admissions probability.
Median earnings
A reported median for a defined cohort and timepoint. It is not a salary guarantee.
Field-of-study outcomes
Program-level outcomes are aggregate records linked to federal-aid data and may not represent all graduates.
Missing or privacy-suppressed values
Unavailable values are not zero and should not be interpreted as weak performance.

List eligibility

Metric-based lists include only schools with a publishable value for that metric. Excluded counts are shown when relevant.

Conservative launch rules index 7919 useful pages and keep 1073 weak or thin pages out of the sitemap.

Data freshness

Raw files and hashes are recorded in source metadata. The latest normalized run generated 8990 static pages and JSON endpoints.

Source files include Most-Recent-Cohorts-Institution_03232026.zip, Most-Recent-Cohorts-Field-of-Study_03232026.zip, CollegeScorecardDataDictionary.xlsx, InstitutionDataDocumentation.pdf, FieldOfStudyDataDocumentation.pdf.

Non-goals

The site does not provide admissions predictions, financial aid advice, official rankings, or school endorsements.