It’s that time of year when acceptance letters from colleges start coming in and high school seniors and their families have to make a decision weighted by financial considerations and future employment opportunities about where to attend college. The factors that go into making a smart college choice can be overwhelming, and acquiring information from schools is not often an easy task. To aid families in this major life decision, the U.S. Department of Education’s College Affordability and Transparency Center has created a college scorecard to help determine what college is a good personal fit. Students and their families using the scorecard can search by institution to learn more about the college’s affordability and value or can select factors that are important in their college search (i.e. degree and major, size, region, campus setting, etc). Each scorecard contains five important pieces of information about a college of interest: costs, graduation rate, loan default rate, median borrowing, and employment. The hopeful result is that students will participate in a well-informed higher education search and choose colleges appropriate to their career aspirations and within reasonable financial means so they will not graduate bent over in unmanageable debt.

Search for colleges via the scorecard.