U.S. Department Of Education Announces Changes To College Scorecard, Plans For Future Expansion – Mondaq
In late May the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) announced several changes to its College Scorecard, a tool that is intended to help students and their families make informed decisions about postsecondary enrollment. Then, in July – in a final rule in which the Department announced that it would rescind its “gainful employment” regulations effective July 1, 2020 – the Department explained that it plans to expand the program-level and institution-level data available from the College Scorecard in the future. The purpose of the expansion is to help students “make enrollment choices informed by debt and earnings data, thus enabling a market based accountability system to function” and to “help taxpayers understand where their investments have generated the highest and lowest returns.”
In addition to updating the College Scorecard with the most recent data on certain existing metrics, as of May 2019 the Department added information about additional types of institutions and new categories of data:
- Updated data: The Department updated the College Scorecard to include more recent data for metrics such as average annual cost and graduation rate, as well as information about student demographics. Previously, the Department has updated the College Scorecard each fall; going forward, the Department will update certain data multiple times throughout the year as the data become available.