About College Costwise

What U.S. colleges actually cost, and what their students actually earned — straight from federal data.

College Costwise is an independent reference site. It publishes institution cost and net-price figures, graduation and earnings outcomes, student debt and repayment measures, cost calculators and comparisons, together with calculators and explainers that help you interpret them.

Where the data comes from

Every figure on this site is derived from datasets published by U.S. federal agencies. These works are in the public domain in the United States (17 U.S.C. §105), which is why we can republish them freely and why we do not need to negotiate any licence.

U.S. Department of Education, College Scorecard — Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development (OPEPD). https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/ · covers release 2026-06-10

What we do not do

We do not scrape or republish third-party commercial content, news articles, or other publishers’ work.
We do not show prices from commercial sources. The only cost figures shown are those published by federal agencies, and each is labelled with the period it covers.
We do not use any photography or illustrations. Everything is rendered as data: numbers, tables, and charts drawn in CSS.
We do not accept payment to change a figure, ranking, or rating.

Accuracy and corrections

Because the content is generated from published datasets rather than written by hand, an error here almost always means either a mistake in our processing or a change upstream. If you find a figure that looks wrong, please tell us — see Contact. Each dataset is credited on the page where it appears, so you can always check the original.

Independence

This site is an independent, informational resource. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by any government agency, hospital, college, university, or brand named on this site. All names and marks are the property of their respective owners and are used for identification only.