Data notes
What the numbers mean.
Every figure on CollegeLineup is published data reported for a stated year and group of students. This page explains what each kind of number covers, and where it stops.
Current build
5,800 colleges, updated August 23, 2026
Active Title IV institutions that are primarily postsecondary and open to the public. The build also carries 401 fields of study, 198,752 college and field records, and 654 occupations, across 25 published measures that each carry their own year, scope, and limits.
The data is prepared ahead of time and shipped with the site, so no page waits on an outside service and nothing you type is sent anywhere.
What each number covers
One measure per question
| Kind of number | What it covers | Key limit |
|---|---|---|
| Institution directory | Names, aliases, city and state, control, level, campus setting, size band, mission designations such as HBCU and tribal college, and the pages each college publishes for applications and net price. | These describe one collection year. A college can move, merge, rename, or close between updates, so confirm anything time-sensitive with the college. |
| Cost and aid | Average net price for students who received federal aid, published tuition in and out of state, total published cost, the share of undergraduates receiving a Pell Grant, and median federal loan debt. | Net price is one average for one group of students. Your own price depends on your family finances, your state, and the aid a college offers you. |
| Admissions | Applications, admissions, enrolled counts, SAT and ACT ranges, and what each college says it considers in an admission decision. | Only colleges without an open admission policy report this. Score ranges cover enrolled students who submitted a score, and many students do not. |
| Completion and outcomes | Completion within 150 percent of normal time, first-year retention, and median earnings measured six and ten years after entry. | Earnings cover students who received federal aid and are calculated across a whole system, so two campuses can share one figure. They describe past students, never a promise about you. |
| Fields of study | Awards conferred by field and award level, program-level earnings and debt after graduation, and whether credentials in a field can be finished fully online. | Awards describe a single year of graduates. Small programs are suppressed to protect privacy, so a blank is common and never means a low number. |
| Occupations | National median and quarter-point wages, how many people work in an occupation, and which fields of study commonly lead toward that work. | Wages cover everyone in an occupation, including people with decades of experience and people who studied something else. A link between a field and an occupation is not a placement record. |
Every consequential number on the site opens to show the cohort or year it describes, the scope it covers, and its limits.
Missing values
A blank stays a blank
When a number is not reported for a college, the page says so. It is never turned into a zero, never quietly rounded up from nothing, and never used to push a college down a list. A value can be missing because the college did not report it, because it does not apply, or because too few students were in the group to publish it safely without identifying someone.
Lists that filter on a number say how many colleges were left out for not reporting it, so a short list never looks like a complete one.
Truth boundaries
What these numbers cannot say
- Earnings figures are history for a specific group. They cover reported cohorts, usually only students who received federal aid, from years that have already passed. They are context, never a promise about your future pay.
- Federal debt is not total debt. It leaves out private, state, family, and institutional borrowing, so the real total can be higher.
- An online flag is not program confirmation. It says credentials in that field could be completed remotely. Only the college can confirm the exact program, format, and availability in your state.
- A field-to-occupation link is a possible path, not a placement record. It means the field commonly prepares people for that work, not that graduates were observed taking it.
- Some outcome values cover a whole system. Where two campuses share a figure, the page that prints it says so.
Go deeper
How the numbers get handled
This page covers what the numbers mean. The methodology page explains how they are labeled, joined, compared, and kept honest once they are in.
Data updated August 23, 2026.