Tag Archives: college scorecard

admissions, college costs, college news

Wednesday’s Parent: A Quick Look at the Updated College Scorecard

 

college scorecard

 

This past Saturday, President Obama unveiled his new College Scorecard. “You’ll be able to see how much each school’s graduates earn, how much debt they graduate with, and what percentage of a school’s students can pay back their loans,” the president said in his weekly address.

College Prep Expert and Long Island College Prep Examiner, Wendy David-Gaines, explains how the scorecard works:

Information about the performance of U.S. institutions was collected from over 7,000 colleges and universities over a period of 18 years. In addition to families using the College Scorecard to personalize their own college ranking list, the national and comprehensive data can be used by policymakers and researchers for their own analysis. “The old way of assessing college choices relied on static ratings lists compiled by someone who was deciding what value to place on different factors. The new way of assessing college choices, with the help of technology and open data, makes it possible for anyone – a student, a school, a policymaker, or a researcher – to decide what factors to evaluate,” according to the White House Fact Sheet.

Parents and students can use the scorecard to make more informed, wise decisions about the ROI of a college education. For further information on the college scorecard, read:

College scorecard revamp heavy on outcomes

 

admissions, college guidance, college planning, websites

College Abacus: A tool for students and parents

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.

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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.

college abacusWith 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.