The U.S. Department of Education is planning to add a lot more data to its College Scorecard, the online database of information about two- and four-year colleges and universities. It has been heavily criticized for lacking information on the earnings and debt for college students.
Users can look up individual institutions to find details on cost, graduation rate, student body demographics and other characteristics. But in its current state, the College Scorecard is not very useful for low-income students because it promotes selective (and often expensive) institutions, such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford, said Diane Auer Jones, assistant secretary for postsecondary education at the U.S. Department of Education. It also doesn’t let users compare programs within the same institution, said Mark Schneider, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, a research arm of the department.
