In last week’s state of the Union, President Obama announced the creation of the College Scorecard. This is another step in the attempt to give parents and students an accurate picture of the cost and the value of college degrees.

Another tool, College Abacus was the first website to enable students to compare their net prices across 3000+ other schools in one place, College Abacus is available now in both Spanish and English.

With the support of their new grant from the Gates Foundation’s College Knowledge Challenge, College Abacus will go two steps beyond the College Scorecard. At their official launch in September 2013, College Abacus will provide college-bound students with an easy way to generate individualized net-price results and the results page will include the full sweep of required items from the scorecard. The ShoppingSheet function, now in development, will allow students to manually enter data from their college aid award letters, thereby enabling them to compare financial aid packages with ease and to view their awards within the context of their net price calculator results. By 2015, they expect to collect sufficient data to begin issuing accuracy scores for net price calculators – a step yet to be taken or even encouraged by the Department of Education. Though net price calculator results are not intended to be exact, we at College Abacus believe that schools should offer students results that are within striking distance of their final financial aid award.

Mark these sites and use them to help you determine which college is the best value both during college and after graduation.