795 US universities carry a payback figure on this site. This page sets out exactly how each one is produced, what it cannot tell you, and the cases where we publish nothing at all.
Every figure is a published value from the US Department of Education College Scorecard, which is assembled from federal tax records and financial-aid files rather than from institutions describing themselves. We import median earnings ten years after entry, median federal loan debt at graduation, average net price, completion rate and admission rate, and we store the Scorecard's own institution id so later refreshes update the same record.
Matching is done on a normalised name, and where we hold a state for a university it has to agree with the Scorecard's. Where two institutions share a name and the state cannot separate them, we import nothing — attaching one university's salary figures to another would be worse than having no page.
A degree is worth what it adds over not having one, so the sum is:
$39,520 is the median earnings of a US worker whose highest qualification is a high-school diploma. Two guard rails keep the result honest: where the premium is under $2,000 a year we publish no payback at all — dividing by a premium of a few dollars produces answers in the hundreds of years, which is arithmetic rather than information — and the figure is capped at 30 years, shown as "30+".
Grades are percentiles of the actual spread, recomputed whenever the data is refreshed, so a C genuinely means "average for a US university" rather than "passed a threshold we picked".
A university whose graduates show no measurable premium over a high-school diploma keeps no grade at all rather than an F by default — there is no payback period to place on the curve.
They are not per subject. The Scorecard publishes one figure per institution, so a nursing cohort and a fine-art cohort at the same university are blended into a single median. A specialist school will always look stronger than a broad university teaching the same subject just as well.
They include people who left without finishing. That is deliberate — it measures the risk of enrolling, not the reward of graduating — but it pulls down universities serving students who stop and restart.
They ignore private borrowing. Only federal loans appear, so families who financed study another way show as low debt.
They are US-only. The Scorecard is a US dataset; we do not apply it to universities elsewhere, and we do not estimate a substitute.
The underlying records are federal and can be checked against the College Scorecard directly. If you believe we have matched the wrong institution — most likely where universities have merged or renamed — tell us and we will correct the mapping. We do not remove a correct figure on request.
Information only, not financial advice. We are not a lender or a licensed adviser.