Browse PlainCollege

PlainCollege is built on the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard — the federal government's most comprehensive public dataset on higher-education outcomes. The directory covers every Title IV–eligible institution: public universities, private nonprofit colleges, and for-profit schools that participate in federal financial-aid programs. Each year the Department refreshes the file with new institutional reports, federal student-aid records, and de-identified earnings data linked to IRS tax records for former Pell Grant and federal-loan recipients.

You can browse the directory along three primary axes. The colleges A-Z index lists every Title IV institution alphabetically, with state and ownership type. The state index groups institutions by U.S. state — useful when you have a geographic preference or are researching regional accessibility. The programs index uses CIP (Classification of Instructional Programs) codes, the federal taxonomy that lets you compare the same field of study across schools without worrying about department-name variations.

Beyond the directory, rankings let you sort the dataset by ordered metrics — highest earnings, most selective, best value, largest enrollment. Guides translate the data into actionable research questions: net price vs sticker price, ROI of community college vs four-year university, how to read federal admission rates, and what earnings data does and does not tell you about a degree.

All earnings figures reflect federal-aid recipients only and are measured 6 and 10 years after enrollment. The Scorecard suppresses values when fewer than 30 students appear in a cohort, per federal privacy rules — small programs at small institutions therefore commonly show "not reported." Net-price figures account for grant aid where IPEDS provides it; sticker tuition does not. Always confirm financials with the institution before committing to enrollment decisions.

The directory is organized to support multiple research workflows. Prospective undergraduates often start with geography (in-state vs out-of-state cost differential is the largest single financial factor), narrowing by state and then comparing schools within commuting distance. Adults returning to higher education frequently start with program (which institutions offer their target credential, what does completion look like for that field). Parents and counselors often start with rankings (which schools cluster at the top of earnings, completion, or value metrics for the cohort they are advising). Each workflow eventually drills into individual institutional profiles for the full picture.

Each institutional profile aggregates approximately three dozen data points from the Scorecard and IPEDS, organized into four sections: admissions (acceptance rate, SAT/ACT score ranges, application volume), costs (sticker tuition, net price by income band, room and board, books and supplies, total cost of attendance), aid and debt (Pell percentage, federal loan usage, median federal-loan debt at graduation, default rates), and outcomes (completion rate, retention rate, transfer rate, median earnings at 6 and 10 years after enrollment, repayment rates). Where the underlying data is sparse, we show "not reported" rather than fabricate or interpolate.

Program-level pages add a different lens: instead of aggregating an institution, they aggregate a field-of-study across institutions. Pick a CIP code (for example 14.0903 Computer Software Engineering) and the program page shows median earnings, median debt, and completer count for every school where the federal data is non-suppressed. This is the most direct way to answer "what do Computer Software Engineering graduates of THIS specific school earn?" — a question the institutional profile alone cannot answer because schools enroll students across many programs with very different earnings outcomes.