The College Scorecard is a federal public data resource for higher-education outcomes. 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 surveys, federal student-aid records, and Treasury-derived earnings.

Because the Scorecard is one dataset organized in many ways, PlainCollege exposes it through multiple browsing dimensions. The same college can be reached by state (geography), by program (field-of-study earnings), or by ranking (best value, highest earning, most selective). The detail page is canonical, every category navigates back to the same institutional profile, but the categories themselves serve different research questions.

Geographic browsing is the most common entry point. Prospective students who already know where they want to live often start by narrowing to a state or metropolitan area. State-level pages aggregate institution counts, average tuition, and average earnings; metro-level pages provide additional granularity for major college towns and urban regions. Note that state aggregates include public flagships, regional comprehensives, community colleges, and private institutions in the same denominator, drill down to individual institutions when comparing within a state.

Program-level browsing answers a different question: "What do graduates of this specific field earn, and where do they earn the most?" Program pages use CIP (Classification of Instructional Programs) codes, the standardized federal taxonomy that lets you compare Biology 26.0101 at one school against Biology 26.0101 at another without worrying about different department names. Program-level earnings are reported four years after credential receipt for federal-aid recipients only; this is a narrower population than the overall graduating class and should be interpreted accordingly.

Ranking categories apply ordered sort rules to the same data. Best-value rankings weight earnings against net price; highest-earning rankings sort on raw median earnings; most-selective rankings sort on IPEDS admission rate; largest rankings sort on reported undergraduate enrollment. Rankings are useful framing but always inherit the underlying data's limitations, suppression for small cohorts, lag from data publication, and demographic non-representativeness of the federal-aid-recipient earnings sample.

Whichever category you start in, the same source limitations apply. The College Scorecard suppresses cells that do not meet reporting and privacy standards and applies additional privacy treatment to earnings. Small programs at small institutions therefore commonly show "data not reported" rather than a number; this can be missing by design, not by error. Tuition figures reflect institutional reports and may not align with the academic year you are researching; net-price fields reflect defined aid-recipient cohorts, not individual quotes.