PlainCollege exists to turn federal college-outcome data into pages a student, parent, or counselor can actually read. This page explains how those pages are produced, the standards we hold the data to, and exactly how to get an error fixed. We document the real process — including what is automated — rather than claim a level of hand-review we do not perform.

How Our Pages Are Produced

Every data page on PlainCollege is generated from official datasets through a documented pipeline, not written by hand and not generated from unsourced text:

1. Acquisition — We download the complete U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard release (institution-level and program-level field-of-study files) directly from the federal API, together with IPEDS institutional characteristics.
2. Validation — Records are checked against the source for structural integrity, unit consistency (dollars, rates, counts), and plausible ranges before anything is published. Figures that fail a sanity check are held back, not guessed at.
3. Derivation — We compute the added-value metrics that the raw files do not contain — return-on-investment, debt-to-earnings ratios, national and in-state percentiles, and peer comparisons — using methods documented on our methodology page.
4. Presentation — Each school, program, ranking, and guide page renders directly from the validated database at request time, so what you see reflects the current published dataset, with its vintage shown in context.
5. Editorial review — Templates, methodology, rankings logic, guides, and any narrative text are reviewed and maintained by the PlainCollege editorial team. Individual entity pages are produced programmatically from the reviewed templates; we do not claim to manually review all 6,000+ school pages and 70,000+ program pages.

Sourcing Standards

• Every figure traces to a named, public, primary source — principally the College Scorecard, IPEDS, and the Treasury/IRS earnings linkage that the Scorecard publishes.
• We present reported figures as the source publishes them. We do not apply inflation adjustments, modeling, or weighting to the underlying numbers; where we derive a metric, we say so and explain the calculation.
• We do not republish unsourced statistics, fabricated figures, or scraped content. If the federal source suppresses a value (for example, earnings for cohorts under the privacy threshold), we show the gap rather than fill it.
• We accept no payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from any school, college, or education company. Coverage and ordering are determined by the data alone.

Update Cadence

The College Scorecard is refreshed annually by the Department of Education, typically in the fall. We monitor the federal release calendar and rebuild our database from the new release within days of each publication. Each data element carries the vintage of its source; because earnings are measured years after enrollment, the most recent figures reflect cohorts who enrolled six to ten years earlier — an inherent property of the federal data, documented on our methodology page.

Corrections Process

We want every number on PlainCollege to match its federal source. If you find a figure that looks wrong, tell us and we will investigate:

1. Report — Email hello@plaincollege.com with the page URL and the value you believe is incorrect. Our contact page has the same address.
2. Verify — We compare the displayed value against the current College Scorecard / IPEDS source record for that institution or program.
3. Fix at source — If our pipeline mis-handled the value, we correct it in the data layer and re-derive any dependent metrics, so the fix propagates to every page that uses it — not just the page you reported.
4. Confirm — We reply to let you know what we found. If the figure was correct as reported by the federal source (for example, a counter-intuitive earnings number that the Scorecard genuinely publishes), we explain the source and context rather than change it.

Where the discrepancy lies in the federal source itself, the correct channel is the Department of Education — we will point you to it, and note the limitation on the relevant page.

Editorial Independence

PlainCollege is an independent publisher and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the U.S. Department of Education, the federal government, or any college or university. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising. Advertisers do not influence which institutions we cover, how we rank them, or how we present any figure.