Giving Compass' Take:

• The U.S. Department of Education is making changes to the College Scorecard, which is an online database that includes all pertinent information about colleges and universities. 

• How will the addition of more data to the College Scorecard help students make more informed decisions? How will it help with the institutions' accountability?

• Read more about College Scorecard and if it works well enough for students. 

The U.S. Department of Education is planning to add a lot more data to its College Scorecard, the online database of information about two- and four-year colleges and universities. It has been heavily criticized for lacking information on the earnings and debt for college students.

Users can look up individual institutions to find details on cost, graduation rate, student body demographics and other characteristics. But in its current state, the College Scorecard is not very useful for low-income students because it promotes selective (and often expensive) institutions, such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford, said Diane Auer Jones, assistant secretary for postsecondary education at the U.S. Department of Education. It also doesn’t let users compare programs within the same institution, said Mark Schneider, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, a research arm of the department.

Right now, the College Scorecard includes a list of each school’s five most popular degree programs and a list of all its academic program offerings. There’s also general information on the average graduation rate for all students and median salary data for graduates who took out loans.

Between 2014 and 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects a 13.8 percent increase in the number of jobs that typically require a master’s degree and a 12.2 percent increase for jobs that typically require a doctoral or professional degree.

Changes to the College Scorecard, Auer Jones said, also will help keep for-profit schools accountable. Some, such as Corinthian Colleges’ 28 for-profit schools, closed under the Obama administration after being fined by the Department of Education for misrepresenting job placement data for graduates and other infractions.

Read the full article about changes to the college scorecard by Delece Smith-Barrow at The Hechinger Report