This project is intended to improve higher education data visibility by making key outcomes data readily accessible in one easy-to-navigate website. We intend for the data, methodology, and summaries to be transparent. We welcome your feedback.
Cameron Smither
Cameron Smither is the Director of Assessment & Network Engagement at the American Association for State Colleges & Universities (AASCU) and moonlights as postsecondary education policy researcher for special projects. In his role at AASCU, he and his team are developing the association’s strategy for facilitating comprehensive institutional transformation for equitable student outcomes. Cameron leads with experience guiding cross-divisional reflection and collaboration, quantifying and communicating the “return on investment” of postsecondary credentials, and designing improved measures of institutional performance, cost to students, and student progression to drive continuous improvement.
Prior to joining AASCU, Cameron served as a researcher at the American Institutes for Research on multiple concurrent research & technical assistance projects overlapping postsecondary education, secondary education, workforce development, & economic security. Before that, he was a Presidential Fellow at the George Washington University, providing program support and analysis for their inaugural Office of Diversity & Inclusion. He has a Master of Public Policy degree with a concentration in program evaluation.
Marc Jerome
Marc is the President of Monroe College in the Bronx, New York. Monroe college consistently produces large number of Black and Hispanic graduates and was recently ranked number 1 in social mobility by US News and World Report for Masters Level institutions in the Northeast. He is passionate about improving higher education access and affordability, as well as outcomes for under-represented student groups. He discovered an error in the College Scorecard repayment rates data that was reported on by The Washington Post in 2017. He has tracked and analyzed federal data on debt, earnings, repayment rates and graduation rates for over ten years. Marc served as a negotiator for both U.S. Department of Education Gainful Employment negotiated rule-making sessions. He has written about debt to earnings, repayment rates, and cost of attendance.
The Association of Private Colleges (APC)
APC represents 11 degree-granting, proprietary colleges in New York State with a common commitment to educational excellence, access and affordability. These privately held, primarily family-owned institutions, have on average been serving students for over 90 years, handed down from generation to generation. Our colleges have a long history of producing strong outcomes for students of diverse backgrounds.
Student debt challenges and weak graduation outcomes – especially for low-income students – are pervasive across the higher education landscape. Clear policy guidance and strong enforcement across all sectors of higher education is the best way to improve student outcomes and protect American taxpayers. APC and its member colleges are committed to transparency and accountability in education and, most of all, to ensuring the success of our students.
The Association of Private Colleges proudly supports the research and development of this website. It is APC's hope that this comprehensive research will help foster a more constructive dialog during policy discussions and development.
About the Data
Much time and attention has been spent building the datasets necessary to power this site. These data, and the processes that collect and share them, are complex and balancing that complexity to arrive at intuitive, transparent, and accurate ways to share the insights they hold requires a lot of seemingly small but quite impactful technical decisions. We share the methodology notes with humility and invite others to help us keep them as intuitive, transparent, and certainly accurate as they can be. Specific methodology notes for the three core datasets can be found on their respective pages.
Three primary postsecondary student outcomes – graduation, debt-to-earnings, and student loan repayment – drive our exploration of the data. To maximize accuracy and clarity, each outcome is approached separately and, once the data munging details outlined below are complete, has its own distinct dataset reflecting outcomes for 2-year and 4-year institutions. Each file is built using publicly available data found in the United States Department of Education’s (ED) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and College Scorecard (Scorecard); specifics about the source and source year for each indicator is available in their respective sections’ “Notes & Methodology” page.
For all files, we categorize institutions into sectors (public, non-profit, and for-profit) and predominant degree offered (e.g., "4-year Public") using the Scorecard’s preddeg variable; this may differ from other’s default reporting using an institution’s highest degree.