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Education Dive
Ed Dept makes student debt, earnings data searchable by program
Hallie Busta
Nov. 20, 2019
Dive Brief:
The U.S. Department of Education announced Wednesday that it upgraded
its College Scorecard to let users compare data on median student loan
debt and post-graduate earnings by program of study within institutions.
The new data follows the Scorecard's recent expansion to add 2,100
institutions that grant certificates to the existing set of 3,700
degree-granting schools in the database as well as preliminary data on
debt by program.
While the update reflects a bipartisan push to collect more and better
data on how people fare after earning a credential, it has some
limitations, observers say.
Dive Insight:
Prospective students can use the retooled database, which was first
developed under the Obama administration, to learn how much graduates
in their desired program tend to earn, as well as what they might
expect to pay in federal student loans each month.
The data covers graduates who received federal loans or grants for two-
and four-year degrees as well as certificates and some graduate
programs. Previously, the data was limited to median earnings and debt
at the institutional level.
"This is just a big step forward for higher education data and I think
it's going to spark a lot of discussions on college campuses," said
Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at Seton Hall
University. "If a program has high debt and low earnings, there need be
discussions about whether that program is still useful to offer."
However, the data has some limitations, he noted, as did other higher
ed experts who took to Twitter Wednesday to discuss the news.
For instance, it doesn't include Parent PLUS or private student loans,
which means users might not be aware of the full amount students are
borrowing to afford their credential.
It also doesn't consider students who didn't earn an income, didn't
complete a credential or didn't borrow to attend college. In the latter
case, that could leave out students at affordability-focused
institutions such as public community colleges, where fewer students
take out loans and those who do tend to borrow less relative to
students at four-year colleges.
And for now, it only shows income data for students in their first year
out of college, which offers a limited view of their earnings potential.
Another limitation is the scope of the earnings data itself, which
Michael Itzkowitz, a senior fellow for higher education at Third Way,
said covers only 20% of all programs, according to his analysis.
"It's great and it's a huge effort from the department to put out this
data," he said. But "if we expect that this one release will now guide
most students towards better-performing programs because of this data,
unfortunately too often the answer will be no."
The department is expected to update the data yearly, slowly filling in
a picture of how graduates' earnings prospects and debt levels progress
in subsequent years out of school.
The Wall Street Journal points out in its analysis of the data that
graduates in 15% of programs tracked had more debt than income in their
first year out of school. And for 2% of programs, graduates had more
than twice as much debt as income.
This was more often the case for doctoral and professional degree
programs, which had larger shares of graduates reporting higher
earnings than did those in lower degrees, for which students tended to
borrow less, according to The Journal.
Degrees from specialty institutions rank highly for long-term value to
students, a new report from Georgetown University's Center on Education
and the Workforce (CEW) found. Elite universities were also near the
top of CEW's list, though as the new Scorecard data indicates, earnings
can vary wildly across such vast institutions.
For instance, the Scorecard lists Harvard University's post-graduation
salary range as $37,000 to $129,000. Computer science bachelor's
graduates were at the top of that range while students with a general
bachelor's in English language and literature were at the bottom.
The administration has pitched the Scorecard as a way to help students
be better informed about the college they choose to attend and as an
alternative to earlier accountability measures. But critics say it
isn't doing enough to hold colleges responsible for students graduating
on time and paying off their loans.
A bipartisan group of legislators is pushing to collect data on all
graduates, not just those who received federal aid. They also want to
look at a wider range of factors, such as earnings, employment and
whether graduates went on for further education.
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