About this site
This site answers two questions in exact dollars: what will a college program actually cost you, and what will its graduates actually earn afterward. The answers come from federal data files — College Scorecard, IPEDS, Federal Student Aid, BLS — not from rankings surveys or brochures. Every figure we compute is marked "our math," and the formulas are published in full on the methodology page.
Why we exist
College research runs on two broken sources. Rankings brands sell prestige, and the students we serve say plainly that they no longer trust them. Schools' own sites paint the idealized picture their marketing departments paid for. Forum testimony is honest but unquantified — one graduate's $38,000 salary is a story, not a median. We built the third source: government outcome data translated into the numbers a family budget actually uses. A $40,467 loan balance is an abstraction; $460 a month for ten years at the 2026–27 federal rate is a decision you can weigh.
What we publish
Program-level earnings and debt — the school × major resolution — built from the College Scorecard field-of-study file: 71,664 bachelor's program records in the June 10, 2026 release alone. Around it: full-degree tuition totals priced from schools' own published rates, the gap between sticker price and net price, and payback math by major. We rank by total cost, median pay and payback years, never by reputation. Three house rules govern every page: exact dollars ($40,467, never "about $40K"), every figure sourced and dated inline, every balance translated into a monthly payment.
Who writes this
Data pages carry the byline of our editorial data team. Our data methodologist, [METHODOLOGIST NAME — placeholder, set before publication per strategy §11 Q2], owns every formula on this site and signs the methodology and the statistical editorial built on it — the attribution model is "by the data team, methodology by the methodologist," not fake per-page author personas. Drafts are produced with AI assistance; a human editor re-runs every computed figure against the raw source files before publication, and accountability stays human. The full rules, including our claims discipline and corrections process, are in the editorial policy.
What makes the approach different
None of the three major consumer comparison sites we analyzed — Niche, CollegeSimply, Appily — publishes earnings and debt at program level. We build directly from that federal file, so the site can tell you what nursing graduates of a specific school earn, not what "students like you" might. The money side is walled off from the editorial side: program-search forms fund the site, and they never influence which schools appear, in what order, or with what figures. No school can pay for placement. When we get a number wrong, we fix it and leave a dated correction note — report anything suspect through the contact page.
The site exists for the reader doing the math before signing the loan. If a page ever reads like a brochure, hold us to this one.