How to Choose a College Using Outcomes, Cost, and Risk (Informed Consent)

I want to start with a simple question. What if choosing a college worked more like other high-stakes decisions where you're shown the risks and likely outcomes clearly before you commit? College is expensive and it takes years. And once you start, changing course can be very costly. But most college tools focus on comparison, rankings, or marketing, not on what typically happens to students after they enroll. The College Viability Transparency Tool was built around a different idea: that students and families deserve informed consent before committing to a college. Not recommendations, not more rankings, just a clear disclosure of student outcomes, costs, and risk. Here you can see we are looking at the College Viability Transparency Tool main landing page. It walks you through each step of the decision-making process, from deciding, is college even the right choice for me, through creating your college list, into what should I ask on my campus visits, and finally into the ultimate making your college choice. Each of these sections uses objective data from the IPEDS database to help inform your decision-making process as you work your way through choosing your college. Let's look at the first section, Understanding Your Options. The first assumption this tool challenges is that college is automatically the right next step for every student. Before looking at any specific college, this section looks at college alongside other postsecondary paths using earnings, debt, and opportunity cost over time. The point here is not to talk students out of college. It's to make sure college is being considered as an investment with alternatives, not as a default choice. On this section, we can select different careers. Perhaps we select a career that does not require any sort of post-secondary education, and then maybe we compare that career to another one that does require some sort of degree from a college. After selecting those two different careers, we can then change the career growth trajectory. Maybe if we're working as a stocker or order filler, we expect to get 3% raises every year. Maybe if we're a registered nurse, we know that's a highly in-demand field and we'd like to say we're gonna make 5% raises every year. The tool allows that. What you can then do is compare these two careers against each other and look at the financial story over time. All of this data is pulled from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. You can look at how many years does it take to catch up with that given career choice compared to a $15 per hour job. You can also look at over a 30-year period, how much more or less would I earn with that career compared to a $15 per hour job with a standard 3% raise each year. Here we can see if you're a registered nurse getting 5% raises every year over 30 years, you're gonna make almost $2 million more than had you just taken a $15 per hour job right out of high school. We can also see that expressed graphically with a 30-year career salary change or total earnings comparison. As you can see, the light green line here is the nurse, and it clearly shows that over time, you'll make a lot more money as a registered nurse than you would as a stocker or order filler, or just working a $15 per hour job. That is the power of this tool, not assuming everyone wants to go to college, but clearly showing the risks and opportunity cost where initially you're actually gonna be losing money if you choose to be a nurse, but over time you do earn more income. Our second tool is called Creating Your College List. The next assumption is that once you're choosing between good colleges, they're all roughly the same. This section helps students narrow their list using outcomes like graduation rates, retention, and cost signals rather than reputation alone. This is still an exploratory step. There are no recommendations here. Is about understanding how students actually progress at different institutions. So here you can search or filter what colleges you'd like to look at by state. You can remove previously selected colleges from your list and then add new colleges that you might wanna compare or consider in your selection process. Once those have been added, you can go down here and ask a question about those selected colleges. A good question might be to ask, how many students graduate in 4 years? That's probably what you're expecting, to complete your degree in 4 years at whichever college you attend. So let's click on this and see where it takes us. So now we're looking at the 4-year graduation rate for those colleges that we selected. As you can see here, we have the colleges with the national median So that is all of the private 4-year universities in United States graduate about 43% of their students in 4 years. All of our colleges that we selected, you can see their 4-year graduation rates in 2023 presented here. We can ask what that means. We can also look at the rankings. Barry College graduates more students as a ratio in 4 years in 85% of private college peers. We can look at the trends of this college over a 5-year period. How have these 4-year graduation rates changed? We can take some away if we want to compare more specifically, let's say Morehouse College to the national median. As we can see, Morehouse College's 4-year graduation rate consistently falls below the national median for private 4-year institutions. You can do this for many different questions on that previous screen. We can ask questions about how many admitted students decide to actually attend this college, kind of how popular is this college amongst admitted students. College stability questions: is a college enrollment growing or shrinking? What's an academic experience for a student look like? How much does the college actually spend in its professors and its teachers per enrolled full-time equivalent student? All of these questions can be answered by selecting it and looking on that next screen to compare your selected colleges here. All right, on to Section 3, your campus visit. You've decided college is right for you, you've created your college list, Now you're visiting some of the campuses on that college list. Now you should be wondering, well, what questions should I actually ask my college counselors during the college visit? In this section, an assumption that the College Viability Transparency Tool challenges is that college visits and admissions conversations are neutral exchanges of information. Colleges are generally very good at marketing, This section turns outcome data into specific questions students can bring into their college visits. These aren't gotcha questions. They're questions that help families understand how the school supports students when things don't go exactly as planned. So after selecting your college, you can go down and see what questions do I wanna ask when I'm visiting this particular college as it relates to student support. You can select, ask your question, and it'll go straight to a targeted data-informed question. How does the institution translate higher investment in student support here into access to advising, counseling, tutoring, and other support services? You can see the data for your selected college here, and then the national median across all 4-year private institutions here. You can also click to see what makes a good answer. What are some things you probably should hear them say? What are some things that that college might say that should make you pause and say, huh, are they really answering my question? And a possible follow-up question to ask that college. Let's look at one more example. How about degree completion? This is going back to that 4-year graduation rate. So how does the institution help students stay on track academically when 4-year graduation is more common here than at many similar colleges. So you can see for our selected college, 57% of students graduate in 4 years. Nationally, for private 4-year institutions, only 43% do. What is a good answer? As you ask this question, again, what are some strong responses and what should make you pause as they answer that question? You can do this for 8 different sections for any provided college that you would like to select that is private for your institution. All right, so now you're ready to make your final decision. So let's go to the fourth part of our College Transparency Tool. In this section, and the final assumption that this tool challenges is actually the most important one. That if you like a school and you can afford it, that everything else will work out just fine. This section removes comparison entirely and focuses on one college at a time. It answers a single question. If I attend this college, what does that typically look like for students? We start with probably two of the most important academic and satisfaction outcomes at all colleges. The student retention rate, 79% of students who attend this college as a freshman will return for their second year at that college. And for your graduation rate, we've talked about previously, 36% of students that attend this college will graduate within 4 years. Our next section here is outcome consistency. Instead of a single graduation rate, this shows how many students finish in 4 years, how many take longer, and then how many students don't complete their degree within 6 years. This helps families see completion as a range of outcomes, not as a guarantee. Next, we have cost of degree completion. This shows the, how total cost changes if graduation takes 4 years, 5 years, or 6 years. Including both enrollment costs and delayed entry into the workforce. This is where risk becomes concrete. Taking longer doesn't just feel different, it actually compo— costs more. Not completing your degree at all actually costs the most. And this section of the tool also surfaces that risk. If you don't graduate with a degree at all, how much would that cost you in terms of both money spent on tuition, and also lost potential income because you are attending that college and taking classes. We also look at post-completion financial reality. This says, if things go right, the section shows where graduates typically start financially. It includes median earnings and median debt for students who complete without projecting into the future or adjusting by any program or major. This is a starting point, not a promise. And lastly, we look at institution financial health. If you want to go to a college that supports you, that college needs to be financially healthy and secure. This just gives you a glimpse into that college and some general statements that might flag some risks if that college is possibly struggling financially. And lastly, we have our plain language outcome summary. Or our final college assessment. At the end, everything is pulled together into this plain language summary. It describes what attending this college has typically meant for students in terms of completion, cost, debt, and early career earnings. This paragraph is intentionally straightforward. It's meant to be read slowly before committing and not skimmed over. This tool doesn't tell you where to go. It doesn't rank schools, it doesn't make recommendations, and it doesn't assume that one path is right for everyone. What it does do is it strips away marketing and presents outcomes clearly, so students and families can understand the real risks, costs, and likely experiences before committing to a college. College can still be the right choice, and for many people, it is the right choice. But it should be a choice made with eyes wide open. This tool exists to help families make that decision with clarity, transparency, and informed consent.