Methodology & Data Sources

Start with the figure you are using

• Costs: tuition is only part of an attendance budget. Average cost after grants describes the specified group, not your personal aid offer.
• Outcomes: median means the middle reported value. Read the student group and the years; school averages do not predict your outcome.
• Missing data: not reported, withheld for privacy and not applicable are different states. None means zero.
• Calculator results: use your syllabus or awarding body’s rules. A saved target is an estimate, not an actual course grade.

College data (/colleges/ pages)

• Sources: U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard(institution-level and field-of-study files, June 2026 release) and IPEDS(ADM2024 admissions survey, HD2024 institutional directory). Version identifiers are shown in each page's footer.
• SAT ranges are section sums. Where a single SAT number pair is shown, it is the sum of the section 25th and 75th percentiles — IPEDS publishes no composite SAT percentile. A sum of section percentiles is not a composite-score percentile; it must not be read as the middle half of total scores. ACT composite percentiles are published directly and shown as-is.
• Test-score ranges are enrolled submitters only. Published SAT/ACT percentiles describeenrolled first-year students who submitted scores — not all admitted students or all enrolled students. Every score range on this site carries that label. Historical test-policy labels describe the stated admissions cycle, not current application requirements. Check the institution’s admissions office before applying.
• When no rate is shown. Schools whose applicant pool is under 30 get no percentage — this site's n<30 guard follows the definition of College Scorecard'sADM_RATE_SUPP field. This is not a universal threshold for other federal measures. A few others file numbers that fail basic arithmetic or consistency checks. Those pages show the raw counts — or no admissions numbers at all — instead of a percentage that would imply precision the filing doesn't carry.
• Admissions data year. The summary applicant funnel and score ranges use the stated IPEDS admissions cycle. Historical charts contain earlier collections and may end at different years. Provisional filings can later be revised; a new source release is not incorporated until the site's import and validation have been completed. Benchmarks can place admissions, costs and earnings next to each other, but these measures do not describe the same students or observation period.
• Suppressed earnings. Program-level earnings are withheld by the Department of Education under federal privacy rules. A withheld figure is not zero and is not estimated. Published fields are only part of the record, so a displayed list is not a complete inventory of a school's departments or programs.
• Two earnings measures, kept apart. School-wide median earnings (10 years after entry) and by-major earnings (4 years after completion) come from different cohorts and are always presented in separate, labeled blocks.
• Which schools get pages. Only schools whose pages carry enough real data to be useful. Schools below that bar are excluded from search indexing rather than padded with filler.

Field-of-study earnings: population and limits

Published four-year earnings describe federally aided completers who were working and not enrolled. The categories combine a federal CIP field of study and credential level; they do not identify a school's actual departments. For the 2026-06-10 field-of-study file, EARN_MDN_4YR pools completers from award years 2017–18 and 2018–19, measures earnings in calendar years 2022 and 2023, and adjusts amounts for inflation to 2024 dollars. This mapping comes from the official College Scorecard glossary, checked 2026-09-05 against the exact downloaded file. Other releases require their own verified mapping; otherwise school pages mark the dates unverified. These historical outcomes cannot isolate the effect of choosing a field, predict your pay or rank departments. Shared reporting-group results also cannot rank individual campuses. Withheld earnings stay withheld, and published rows are not a complete list of every field offered.

Exam data (SAT, ACT, AP, IB, UCAS and related pages)

• SAT: structure and percentiles from College Board; score estimation uses College Board's official paper-practice-test ranges. The real digital SAT is adaptive — no single-value conversion table exists, so we don't print one.
• ACT: raw-to-scale tables from ACT's official practice materials (enhanced 2025 format and legacy form); a historical National Ranks table from ACT.org. The displayed period is September 2025–August 2026; this is not an automatic update promise.
• AP: exam structures and score distributions are official (College Board); 1–5 cut scores are not published by College Board — our predictions use third-party historical estimates, shown as ranges and labeled as estimates.
• IB, UCAS, UK degrees, Canadian GPA, attendance: the named scoring and tariff references, supported university grade tables and the user’s entered attendance target. Generic presets and modeled requirements are not a complete check of an institution’s current rules.

Calculators

Every calculator prints its formula and its conventions on its own page (standard US 4.0 scale, weighted-average model, common letter-grade boundaries). Grading policies vary; the printed conventions are the most common ones, not a claim about your school.

Dates, students and institution scope

• Release date: identifies the downloaded file, not the academic year or earnings year. A June 2026 snapshot can contain observations from much earlier.
• Observation period: is the academic year, entering class or fiscal period printed with a chart. A four-year-after-completion measure is a time interval, not a complete calendar date. Where the imported snapshot lacks verified cohort years or a dollar base year, we do not infer them from the release date.
• Institution scope: IPEDS identifies reporting institutions by UNITID. Some Scorecard debt and earnings figures are shared across branches under a federal reporting group. Shared outcomes cannot distinguish one campus from another. Group labels are derived from the records, not verified legal ownership. Admissions and campus costs refer to the individual institution's records; one institution's reported policy does not establish the policy of another campus.
• Field of study: federal CIP categories and degree levels do not identify actual administrative departments. Earnings differences are not a teaching quality ranking or a forecast for a particular student.

Historical earnings charts use the named historical-file mappings in theCollege Scorecard data dictionary. An entry range can pool two academic years; the chart identifies the observation period and inflation base for its specific historical file. That mapping is not reused to date a newer institution snapshot or field-of-study release.

Institution-level ten-year earnings

The ten-year earnings comparison and its FAQ use MD_EARN_WNE_P10 from the June 2026 institution file. It describes federally aided entrants who were working and not enrolled when measured. We have verified the source file and field, but the exact entering cohorts, measurement calendar years and inflation base for this snapshot remain unverified. The date beside the comparison identifies the file release. The current official glossary describes a separate four-year-after-completion measure; its dates do not supply the missing ten-year metadata. Historical earnings charts retain their own verified file-specific dates.

Review and correction process

1. Keep the source version. Imports identify the source file and fingerprint. A website rebuild alone does not update the underlying federal data.
2. Check meaning before display. We keep missing, suppressed and inapplicable states distinct; check units, dates and population labels; and preserve gaps in historical series.
3. Validate the release. Automated checks cover source references, data-to-page consistency and indexability. Changed interactions are tested in a browser. These checks can detect defined errors; they do not certify that every federal filing is correct or that every page has been manually reviewed.
4. Investigate corrections. A report is compared with the cited source and the displayed definition. A confirmed mistake is corrected in a reviewed release; source conflicts remain identified until they can be resolved.

We do not promise immediate adoption of every new source release. Historical charts keep their observed years; known gaps are not filled with generated estimates. The release and retrieval labels on a profile describe its data, not an annual review guarantee.

Corrections

Send the page URL, what you expected and what you saw to [email protected]. An official source is helpful if available. Confirmed corrections go through the release checks above; we do not guarantee a response or resolution date. See Contact & Corrections.