
College Choice - danso
https://github.com/18F/college-choice
======
danso
Some context:

This is the github repo for this site:
[https://collegescorecard.ed.gov](https://collegescorecard.ed.gov)

If you want just the data, here's the landing page with documentation:
[https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/](https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/)

Direct link to the zip: [https://s3.amazonaws.com/ed-college-choice-
public/CollegeSco...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/ed-college-choice-
public/CollegeScorecard_Raw_Data.zip)

The NYT recently wrote an analysis of the salaries data, finding that "at some
expensive colleges, the salaries of students 10 years after enrollment are
bleak, and there is an earnings gender gap at every top university":

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/14/upshot/gaps-in-alumni-
earn...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/14/upshot/gaps-in-alumni-earnings-
stand-out-in-release-of-college-data.html?rref=upshot)

18F is the GSA team that is building a lot of the federal websites and APIs
and open sourcing them.

~~~
audioburn_
According to this data, University of Phoenix grads make more on average than
UT, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, etc. grads. Something smells fishy.

~~~
cryptical
I'll guess the data is skewed because University of Phoenix caters to people
who are already working. Work experience + degree is better than just a
degree.

~~~
Splendor
That was my thought too. It would be interesting if there was some measure of
salary increase upon graduation.

------
nickysielicki
I'm an undergraduate who made this decision in the past 1000 days. I went to
the website and tried to see how much it would have helped me. It wouldn't
have. Here are my criticisms.

* This tool should be clear that it's geared towards 17 year olds that are mature enough to be able to view college as a financial investment. That's not to say that college can't be chosen for the experience of it as well, but I don't think you can recommend colleges on such a personal variable. This type of site can be a great tool if you're willing to put that aside for a moment and merely get information about potential return on an investment, which is useful for everyone regardless of how they feel about what college ought to be.

* Factor in how confident a student is in what they want to study. I think the largest cost sink is in people who don't know what they want to study, but decide to go to an expensive school and say that they'll figure it out in their first two years. What happens when you don't, or school ends up being hard, and you have friends made and leases signed and now you've locked yourself into paying $80k for something you're not going to see return on? Would you have made that decision before?

* Average salary after school is an awful metric. You can't group engineers with those that study humanities and then present that as a meaningful statistic. It makes the person studying philosophy feel more confident in spending money, and it makes the person studying engineering more likely to deviate from liberal arts schools, when in actuality a school can accommodate both groups well but with somewhat different outcomes.

* How do you run a site like this and not ask what their SAT / ACT scores are? This is most certainly the most predictive factor for where you'll go.

* How do you not ask where they live, and talk about in-state tuition rates?

Ultimately it's a nice idea with poor execution, but it's close.

~~~
liyanchang
Hi Nick,

Agreed! There are lots of places where this tool could be improved!
(Disclaimer: I work with people at 18F, Dept. Of Ed, USDS who built this tool,
but I wasn't involved and don't have any privileged information and so here
are some of my personal thoughts)

If I can add a bit of color:

1\. This was developed open-source on GitHub. That means you're welcome to
file an issue or comment at [https://github.com/18F/college-
choice/issues](https://github.com/18F/college-choice/issues) (Given the
interest and number of issues filed so far, I'll probably take this
opportunity to say that it might be a while before the team gets back to you
and appreciate your help and patience!). This shouldn't impress you, but it
is, because it's a complete paradigm shift from how government typically
works.

2\. Average salary is not a great metric and unfortunately, as far as I can
tell, the data isn't sliced by major. You're right in your analysis of how it
skews the data. I actually think loan repayment is probably the more
interesting metric - have others in your income class been able to repay their
debts? You're also right that this tool doesn't help people see that choosing
college A over B because of a $X,000 delta in average salary isn't a good idea
as it's subject to all sorts of personal decisions.

3\. This is really cool not because the tool is perfect, but because the
government is releasing an API to go along with this - a number of private
companies and non-profits have already integrated the data into their tools.
This data, which hasn't been possible to get before, can now be integrated
into the tools that were helpful to you (the ones that calculate in-state
tuition, and ask you for sat/act scores). The underlying API also has many
more data fields than the tool exposes. If fact, you can build one yourself!
([https://api.data.gov/signup](https://api.data.gov/signup) and
[https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/documentation/](https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/documentation/))

~~~
nickysielicki
I typed this comment up as a quick break from work, and rereading my comment I
can say I did not have enough editing. I didn't mean to come across so
critical. It's just so close to being a great idea that can solve what I see
as a huge problem-- why are people taking out loans for a bullshit University
of Phoenix degree? Because they don't know what their options are, and they
don't know what it's going to cost, and they have some feeling in the back of
their head that college is always a worthwhile investment. That's how we
nationally end up with more student debt loan than credit card debt.

With a little more data and a bit more prodding, this could genuinely fix
that. No longer will people be getting their primary source of information
from 2:00AM University of Phoenix commercials.

When I said the execution was poor it was not to say that this is somehow
botched, it's just that it's so damn close. I think 18F is really cool, and I
hope it continues to have cool projects.

At the same time, the tool genuinely wouldn't have helped me, and on HN I feel
like that type of criticism is useful. Not just for the poster, but for people
who are interested in solving problems in this realm and want to get in the
head of someone who would use it.

PS: I signed up for an API key. Thanks for the comment. I'll poke around this
weekend.

------
eitally
There needs to be a better-than-black-and-white way to use salary as a
measuring stick. Perhaps salary above the local mean, or normalized by cost-
of-living indicators, or something. As it is, if you earn $100k/yr in pretty
much 90% of the country, you're doing fantastically and probably one of the
wealthier people in town, but if you live in the top major metros (LA, NYC,
Boston, SF/SV, DC, Seattle, Chicago, ...) you're probably wishing you had a
partner who earned a similar salary so you could even consider buying a house
some day. Just living within 5 miles of a Whole Foods doesn't mean someone is
necessarily happier or better off.

~~~
bkjelden
I agree, but I don't think you can get too specific with any metric without
imposing your own value system on everyone. For example, some believe SF/SV is
overpriced, some view the cost of living as a luxury expense and think it's
easily justified by the weather/culture/etc.

~~~
rattray
Agreed - it's an unfortunate that such an objective measure doesn't exist. I
like to think of the problem as SF (for example) not having its own currency
when it does have its own economy. SF dollars are worth less than Kansas
dollars, for example. If we had a way of breaking this down, it might be
easier to see which parts of pricing differential are "luxury expense."

------
bradleyjg
I've been asked before by younger relatives for advice about college, and it's
really hard to give. I only went one school, I don't even know how it would
have been different for me if I had gone elsewhere, much less how to translate
that into advice for someone else.

I haven't thought about it too much, but it occurs to me that maybe finding
people who were unhappy with their experience would be more useful than
finding people who were happy.

------
pmorici
It's too bad all the 'average cost' data carries the caveat that it only
accounts for the cost for in-state students. That makes the cost part of it
somewhat useless unless you are limiting your search to in-state schools only.

~~~
weiothrow
Agreed. And this makes a world of difference for some institution. Georgia
Tech for example charges more than 3 times more for Out of state students[1]
while scorecard shows an average of $11k [2]

[1]: [http://factbook.gatech.edu/student-related-
information/tuiti...](http://factbook.gatech.edu/student-related-
information/tuition-and-fees-tables-6-1-6-2-6-3/)

[2]: [https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?139755-Georgia-
Insti...](https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?139755-Georgia-Institute-of-
Technology-Main-Campus)

I feel that the fact that they take average aid into account can also be a bit
misleading. Harvard is just $3K more than Georgia Tech? [3] Probably be best
to show Full tuition, then average aid by income levels.

[3]: [https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166027-Harvard-
Unive...](https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166027-Harvard-University)

------
dqdo
I think that the data available here is a good start. To make an informed
decision about which school to attend, it would require the students to
identify the factors that are important to them. Check out the link below for
an example of how one might choose the right school for themselves.
[https://paramountdecisions.com/education.html](https://paramountdecisions.com/education.html)

------
thomasahle
What does "% Earning Above HS Grad" mean? This sorting option doesn't seem to
correlate with any of the bars "Average Anual Cost", "Graduation Rate" or
"Sallary After Attending".

~~~
zevyoura
It means the percentage of attendees who earn more than the average income of
a high school graduate.

~~~
thomasahle
Ah, so the idea is that universities like MIT and Harvard with very high post
graduation salaries, really only have so in average, and many people earn much
less. At least to me it is quite surprising that those two statistics are so
different.

------
CephalopodMD
It's this hosted somewhere?

~~~
tdaltonc
Top of the page
[https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/](https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/)

