photo by: Mike Yoder

The KU campus is pictured Friday, Feburary 6, 2015.

You’ve probably been hearing in the news this week about President Barack Obama’s College Scorecard, a new online tool the White House pitches as “empowering” Americans to choose the right college by providing the “clearest, most accessible, and most reliable national data on college cost, graduation, debt, and post-college earnings.”

You may also be wondering, “What does the College Scorecard say about KU?” Behold:

• Average annual cost to attend KU is $17,690 — right at the national average.

• Graduation rate is 63 percent — comfortably above the national average.

• Salary after attending KU is $44,600 — somewhat above the national average.

• Share of KU students who got federal loans is 45 percent, and the typical total debt (federal loans only) for undergrads who completed school is $20,114.

Now, as several national media outlets have explained in greater detail, it’s important to read the fine print to understand those bullet points in context. This quote from a Chronicle of Higher Education article published online Tuesday captures the gist:

As Jeff Strohl, director of research
at the Georgetown University Center on
Education and the Workforce, put it,
the scorecard “tells you what people
make, on average, but nobody is
average.”

A lot of the College Scorecard nuances seem to stem from the government’s data being linked to federal aid.

For example, at a glance it looks like the less money your family makes, the cheaper it is to attend KU. It costs someone with a family income of less than $30,000 an average of $13,943 to attend KU, while it costs someone whose family makes more than $110,000 an average of $20,773, according to the online tool. However, that’s not really the cost of the education; that’s what people pay.

College Scorecard calculates its average annual cost to attend KU based on in-state students receiving federal financial aid — “after aid from the school, state or federal government.” Likewise, here’s the fine print for the family income breakdown: “Depending on the federal, state, or institutional grant aid available, students in your income bracket may pay more or less than the overall average costs.”

And that $44,600 salary? More specifically, that’s “the median earnings of former students who received federal financial aid, at 10 years after entering the school,” according to College Scorecard. Again, that Jeff Strohl from the Chronicle article:

“The misleading part is the
variation,” he said. “If you’re a
French-literature major at Harvard,
you’d better not look at these data
and think you’re going to earn
$87,000” five years out.

So the tool makes some pretty broad brushstrokes to which users will have to apply their own personal situations. But it does contain a lot of information about a lot of schools nationwide.

If you’re into data (normally not a phrase I’d have in a news story, but this is a higher ed blog and if you’ve read this far down maybe you’re actually interested in that kind of thing?) the White House press release on the College Scorecard (online here) contains scads of information about how numbers were compiled. It also includes the White House’s words, reflecting Obama’s goal of ensuring “prosperity is shared widely,” on why a tool like this is needed:

“At a time when America needs colleges to focus on affordability and supporting all students who enroll, many existing college rankings reward schools for spending more money and rejecting more students. And college leaders and state policymakers who seek to improve institutions’ performance often lack reliable ways to determine how well their schools are serving students.”

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Footnotes

• Notable lecture Wednesday night: Rick Perlstein, New York Times best-selling author and historian of conservatism, will kick off the Hall Center for the Humanities 2015-2016 lecture series with his talk “The Invisible Bridge: From Nixon to Reagan to Palin and Beyond” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union, 1301 Jayhawk Blvd. “A Conversation with Rick Perlstein” is planned at 10 a.m. Sept. 17 at the Hall Center. For the full Hall Center schedule, visit hallcenter.ku.edu.

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Contact me

By email at sshepherd@ljworld.com, by phone at 832-7187 or on Twitter @saramarieshep.