About College Receipt
College Receipt exists to put the money facts about college in one readable place: what a family actually pays, what a major actually earns, and what students actually borrow.
Our Method
Every figure on this site comes from the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard, the federal dataset built from college reporting and graduate tax records. We do not take figures from college marketing pages, and we do not estimate numbers the Scorecard does not publish.
Our Publishing Rules, in Plain English
A college program's own earnings or debt figure is shown only when at least 30 graduates sit behind it. Programs on 30 to 99 graduates are flagged as small and are never ranked. Anything smaller shows the national median for that major, clearly badged, with the national sample size. Earnings and debt pass or fail that test independently. Every program figure prints its sample size next to the number, and each page notes once, at the foot, that program figures come from pooled graduate cohorts.
What We Are Not
We are not a ranking of the best colleges, and a higher median does not make a college better for a particular student. Fit, program strength, and finishing at all matter more than any single figure here. Use the receipt to ask sharper questions, not to skip them.