The federal government’s new College Scorecard has been catnip for higher-education wonks, who’ve spent the week crunching the new trove of data that arrived with it, building and sharing tables and opining on Twitter.
One group that we’ve heard less from are the very people the new tool is meant to help: prospective college applicants, most of whom don’t yet know about it.
To get a student reaction, The Chronicle organized an informal focus group with a handful of sophomores and juniors at Miami Palmetto Senior High School, a public school in this suburb of Miami.
College is still several years away for students in those grades. The amount of progress they have made in their college searches often comes down to their socioeconomic background, said Harry Nerenberg, the school’s college counselor.
The group included about a dozen students, none of them familiar with the Scorecard. They met on Thursday in a computer lab, where they played around with the site and shared their thoughts with a reporter.
In short, they liked it. The students described the tool as simple and easy to use. “It didn’t look intimidating,” said Jimena Alvarez, a sophomore whose family immigrated from Peru.
The layout was so simple, said Michelle Monjarrez, a sophomore lacrosse player, that when she first pulled it up she thought she might be looking at an error message rather than the actual site.
New Information
Despite the streamlined design, the Scorecard raised as well as answered questions for the students. Michelle noticed that Florida International University, where her older sister had just started college, was labeled a Hispanic-serving institution. But she didn’t know what that meant.
While the Scorecard displays lots of information, three metrics get top billing: average annual cost, graduation rate, and salary after attending. They are presented in bar-chart form, with a shaded area representing the college’s figure and a line indicating the national average on that measure as a point of comparison. A couple of students mentioned that comparison when asked what they liked about the site, and one added that he wouldn’t otherwise have known what the average graduation rate was.
Each of those three metrics could be calculated any number of ways, and the Scorecard provides a definition for each if you mouse over them. That feature, however, is probably of more interest to experts who know about the various options than it is to students in the early stages of a college search.
Michael Albregts, a junior, spent some time looking at information about Florida State University on the site. He was a little surprised to see that its graduation rate was 76 percent, which he considered low, though he also noticed that this was still higher than the national average. Still, Michael didn’t see how the statistic applied to him. “I don’t plan on dropping out of college,” he said, “so why would that affect me?”
At least one education researcher anticipated that prospective students might regard graduation rates in that way. Last year Lindsay C. Page of the University of Pittsburgh told The Chronicle that optimism and the relatively long horizon between college selection and graduation could make that figure less resonant than others, like a college’s price.
Michael found more meaning in a pulldown menu called “academic programs,” which revealed that Florida State’s most popular program was business, his intended major. That reinforced his sense that the university — which offered other things he was looking for, like a big student body and a party scene — could be a good fit.
Jimena searched for the University of Miami, and was immediately presented with its $30,000 average annual cost. Her reaction? “Oh, no, I can’t go there,” she said. “Or maybe I can, but I’ll have to have a lot of student loans.”
The Scorecard provides further detail on what students might pay at each college, including information on typical debt, a breakdown of net price by income band, and a link to the college’s net-price calculator. But Jimena had a strong initial reaction, and it wasn’t clear she ever made it far enough into Miami’s data to realize she could get a more personalized price.
‘Very Redundant’
While the students were interested in the data points included on the Scorecard, they also felt that some things were missing. A sense of the student experience, for one. Blake Benson, a junior, wished that it included “reviews from actual students” about “what it’s actually like living there for four years.” Others said they’d like to see information on Greek life, athletics, and dorms.
Also missing: a gauge of academic quality. Michelle said she’d want to know colleges’ ranks, and “which one has a better education.”
The high schoolers didn’t seem to be deeply familiar with U.S. News & World Report’s rankings. But when this reporter asked them to Google a question they had about a college they were interested in, they found that its site, not the government’s, was at the top of their search results.
Cheryl Concepcion, one of the school’s counselors, sat in on the focus group. She wasn’t familiar with the Scorecard yet, either — and didn’t see much need for it. There’s already so much information out there, on consumer-focused sites like the College Board’s BigFuture and on colleges’ own websites, she said, that one more place to find it is “just very redundant.”
Ms. Concepcion is not alone in this view — others have worried that an abundance of consumer tools can overwhelm rather than enlighten. But it’s hard to imagine the Scorecard will be the world’s last college-information site. By releasing so much new, raw data, the government has all but guaranteed that others will be close at its heels.
Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
