The U.S. Department of Education has recently released a (mostly) amazing College Scorecard to see how much various colleges cost and how well they do at graduating students.
There seemed to me to be a few important pieces of information missing, the most important being, "How much will this college cost Me?"
Some colleges and universities adjust their tuition and costs a lot for families' incomes. Some don't. You want to know which ones will be right for you.
There's also no way on their site to match your scores with schools. Sometimes we should reach for the sky, sometimes we should be practical. On College Scorecard, there's no button for, "Show me only colleges I have a realistic chance of being admitted to." Here there is. We'll show the 25th percentiles to show the possibilities.
1) Choose your best estimate of your family's yearly income
< $30k $30–48k $48–75k $75–110k > $110k2) Click your state or territory (to calculate in-state tuition).
AL AK AZ AR CA CO CT DE FL GA HI ID IL IN IA KS KY LA ME MD MA MI MN MS MO MT NE NV NH NJ NM NY NC ND OH OK OR PA PR RI SC SD TN TX UT VT VA WA WV WI WYSorry DC, Virgin Islands, etc. -- no data available.
3) Sort by SAT or ACT scores (optional)
SAT
ACT
I originally made these charts to give talks to primarily lower-income students about four-year college choices. Thus only four-year colleges are listed below. There are many excellent public two-year colleges and speciality schools not included.
Choose income and stateThe data for this site comes from the U.S. Government and the colleges. Click below for their data. The authors of this site are not responsible for any errors in that data or in the processing of that data. This data from November 2022.
Caveats: Unfortunately, I do not have data on out-of-state tuition for public schools. Only colleges where at least 1/3 of students graduate are listed—this is my decision on a minimum threshold below which you'd be taking on substantial risk in attending.
(For schools that did not report SAT 25th/75th levels, an estimate was used. ACT breakdowns coming soon. Apologies to the many great schools that don't use either test and are thus not included.)
All code used on this site is available at GitHub.
Made by Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert, an MIT Prof. interested in understanding data and in helping people who might not believe they can afford college reach for their dreams. Contact him at cuthbert@mit.edu or michael.asato.cuthbert@gmail.com