The College Scorecard is the federal government's primary public data resource for understanding higher-education outcomes at the institution level. It covers every Title IV–eligible school, public universities, private nonprofit colleges, and for-profit institutions, that participates in federal financial aid programs. Each year the Department of Education refreshes the file with new enrollment, cost, and outcomes data, drawing on IPEDS institutional surveys, federal student-aid records, and de-identified IRS earnings linkages for former Pell Grant and federal-loan recipients.

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 one year 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 suppression thresholds apply. The College Scorecard suppresses earnings data when fewer than 30 students appear in a cohort, per federal privacy rules. Small programs at small institutions therefore commonly show "data not reported" rather than a number, this is missing-by-design, not missing-by-error. Tuition figures reflect sticker prices from institutional reports and may not align with the academic year you are researching; net-price calculations include financial aid where IPEDS reports it.