PlainCollege is built on the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard. Its complete files principally cover active IPEDS institutions participating in Title IV aid and can also include some non-Title-IV institutions that meet similar criteria. The Department refreshes components several times per year using institutional reports, federal student-aid records, and Treasury-derived earnings records.

You can browse the directory along three primary axes. The colleges A-Z index lists institutions in PlainCollege's snapshot alphabetically, with state and ownership type. The state index groups institutions by U.S. state. 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 relying on 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.

Institution-level earnings reflect federal-aid recipients and are measured 6 and 10 years after enrollment. The Scorecard suppresses cells that do not meet reporting and privacy standards and applies additional privacy treatment to earnings, so some values correctly show "not reported." Net price is an average for full-time, first-time undergraduate Title IV recipients after grant and scholarship aid, not a personalized quote. Always confirm financials with the institution before making an enrollment decision.

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.