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College Ledger

one honest chapter

About

College Ledger puts every U.S. institution in the College Scorecard on one page each — what it costs by family income, what graduates earn and owe, and, for 89 campuses, the alumni the archive remembers.

created by Vishal Singh & Uma Huggins

Sources

U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard (2026-06 release) · IPEDS 2023· Wikidata & Wikimedia Commons & Wikipedia (extracted 2026-07-09/10 (alumni panel), 2026-07-16/17 (facts, portraits)). All public data; alumni records are CC0.

Methods

  1. 01

    Stage the Scorecard corpus

    The 2026-06 College Scorecard release is read directly from the raw archive: the most-recent institution snapshot (42 columns), all thirty annual files 1996–2026 for trend lines, and the field-of-study files for program-level earnings and debt.

  2. 02

    Join the IPEDS directory

    IPEDS 2023 supplies the identity scaffold — coordinates, county, NCES locale, sector, level, and fall enrollment — joined to the Scorecard on unitid.

  3. 03

    Build the unitid ↔ Wikidata crosswalk

    Wikidata items holding an IPEDS ID are pulled by property query, then verified with a coordinate sanity check (campus location vs. Wikidata's) to catch system-vs-flagship and same-name mismatches.

  4. 04

    Extract the alumni panel

    For the 89 Tier-1 campuses, every person Wikidata records as educated there: counts, field of work in thirteen buckets, gender by birth decade, occupations, and the most-covered exemplars.

  5. 05

    Fetch imagery with its licenses

    Campus photos and portraits come from Wikimedia Commons. Every referenced file gets a manifest row — artist, license, source link — and no image renders without one.

  6. 06

    Add the Wikipedia layer

    Each Tier-1 school's lead extract (with revision ID for provenance) and monthly article pageviews since 2015, from the Wikimedia REST APIs.

  7. 07

    Compute context

    Sector quantile grids (control × level) and within-sector percentiles for every headline metric, plus each school's eight nearest peers in its sector.

  8. 08

    Assemble one payload per school

    Everything above lands in a single JSON per institution, with the caveats shipped inside the payload so no page can forget to render them.

  9. 09

    Bake the site

    A fully static build renders all 6,273 profiles at build time. The published site makes no database or storage calls — what you read was checked in at build.

The rules this site reads by

  • Suppressed is suppressed. Privacy-suppressed and uncollected values render as “not reported” — never zero, never imputed.
  • A gap is not a zero. Trend lines break where a measure wasn't collected; early-year nulls mean “not yet collected.”
  • Earnings cover federally aided (Title IV) students only — students who never took federal aid are invisible to these figures.
  • Percentiles are within-sector by default and labeled as such (“82nd percentile among private nonprofit 4-years”).
  • Wikidata measures recorded notability — access × achievement × documentation — never placement rates or institutional quality.
  • Geography is the campus address, not where students live or the area a school serves.

Why there are no rankings

The Scorecard measures money; Wikidata measures memory. Neither measures teaching, belonging, or what a particular student will make of a particular place — so this site orders schools alphabetically, geographically, or by the reader’s own question, never by a composite score.

Images

Photographs and portraits are hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under free licenses. Free-licensed is not public domain: every image on this site carries its artist and license, linked to the source file.

data built 2026-07-17 · scorecard 2026-06 · ipeds 2023