{"id":1385,"date":"2015-10-05T12:45:08","date_gmt":"2015-10-05T12:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/families\/?p=404"},"modified":"2015-10-05T12:45:08","modified_gmt":"2015-10-05T12:45:08","slug":"the-new-college-scorecard-how-can-it-help-families","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2015\/10\/05\/the-new-college-scorecard-how-can-it-help-families\/","title":{"rendered":"The New College Scorecard: How Can It Help Families?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"graphic<\/a>
Graphic by Perry Threlfall.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So you or your child wants to go to college? Terrific. Investing in education is a wise use of time, helping to ensure that communities are full of well-rounded, engaged people who actively participate in the world.<\/p>\n

But the challenge remains: which college to choose?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s never been so hard to answer that question. There are thousands of colleges and universities all over the country, and college can cost a lot of money. Everyone wants to find the \u201cright\u201d college, but what that means varies from person to person.<\/p>\n

There are college counselors and magazines, websites, and friends who offer information; the government wants to help too.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago U.S. Department of Education\u00a0released a mountain of data<\/a>\u00a0about colleges and universities as part of a revamped \u201cCollege Scorecard<\/a>.\u201d This tool, partly of ED\u2019s College Affordability and Transparency Center<\/a>, aims to help people assess a school\u2019s affordability and value so that they can pick an appropriate institution. Some even claim<\/a> that the Scorecard will change how students choose colleges.<\/p>\n

But it shouldn\u2019t. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, it\u2019s possible to use the new tool to look up a college you think you want to attend and find out that it\u2019s too expensive, or that most students who go there end up in debt they have trouble paying off. You might even be surprised to learn that while the college charges a lot of money, most of the students don\u2019t earn a lot of money after college. That\u2019s good to know, but you can be easily misled.<\/p>\n

Consider that the school that seems most affordable and open to students who have little money or are the first in their family to attend college is\u2026Harvard<\/a>. That\u2019s because the Scorecard focuses on price and graduation rates and earnings after college, and neglects to mention a really important factor: admissions. For that information, you have to cruise over to College Navigator<\/a>, where you\u2019ll learn that Harvard receives more than 34,000 applications a year and admits just 6% of those people. It doesn\u2019t help much if the most affordable college with the highest graduation rate is impossible to get into, yet according to the Scorecard Harvard is tops, along with MIT and Stanford.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a problem that the Scorecard implies that what a given college\u2019s students earn, or how they do at paying off their debt, has nothing to do with who attends that college or what they did in college. We should expect colleges that mainly enroll wealthy students to have high graduation rates, low debt, and high post-college earnings. These students would have these advantages almost no matter where they went to college. But the wealth of a college\u2019s students cannot be observed using the Scorecard.<\/p>\n

Even so, you\u2019ll be tempted to ask\u2014why does College A look like this and College B look like that? And that precisely what the Scorecard really isn\u2019t good for answering. Comparing colleges requires a lot more work and information than the Scorecard or any comparable simple tool provides. Taking the graduation rate or the earnings of a college that admits 80% of applicants and enrolls loads of students from low-income families and comparing<\/em> those outcomes to those of a college that cherry-picks the wealthy students it admits is irresponsible. You shouldn\u2019t conclude that New York University is \u201cbetter\u201d because its graduates earn more than the City University of New York\u2019s graduates. They serve very different students.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s what the Scorecard is good for:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Looking up information to get to know a college better. Test your assumptions. Did you think College X admitted a lot of low-income students or had a high overall graduation rate? Maybe you\u2019re wrong. Good to know. You can see who pays what and where. That\u2019s helpful.<\/li>\n
  2. Using the information when discussing college with people advising on the decision. The Scorecard can help identify topics to discuss and guide the conversation. The person you work with should be able to tackle questions you have about the Scorecard, and if they don\u2019t, you need to keep asking until you get answers.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    But please, don\u2019t act as if the Scorecard actually gives a college a score. It doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

    Families shouldn\u2019t rule out a college or decide on one using this information. If students want to reach for college, they need to talk to knowledgeable people who can help.<\/p>\n

    Start there.<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Sara Goldrick-Rab is Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also Senior Scholar at the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education and an affiliate of the Center for Financial Security, Institute for Research on Poverty, and the Consortium for Chicago School Research. In 2014, she founded the Wisconsin Harvesting Opportunities for Postsecondary Education (HOPE) Lab. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    So you or your child wants to go to college? Terrific. Investing in education is a wise use of time, helping to ensure that communities are full of well-rounded, engaged people who actively participate in the world. But the challenge remains: which college to choose? It\u2019s never been so hard to answer that question. There […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1903,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17274,8959,78,13],"class_list":["post-1385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-advice","tag-families","tag-higher-education","tag-inequality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1385\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}