Reference Reference tableQC clean AI-training-safe

US College Outcomes (Dept. of Education College Scorecard)

Cost and outcomes for every U.S. college in one clean table - the fields prospective students and workforce researchers actually want, lifted out of a ~3,000-column government CSV. The Department of Education's College Scorecard is authoritative but unusable raw (cryptic codes, 'PrivacySuppressed' sentinels); we select ~18 fields and ship one fat row per institution: identity and location, ownership, admission rate, median SAT/ACT, undergrad enrollment, cost of attendance and net price, median graduate earnings 10 years out, completion and retention rates, median debt, Pell share and the 3-year default rate. Keyed by the federal UNITID. Public domain.

6K
rows
17
columns
0.9 MB
download
Source
U.S. Dept. of Ed.
Licence
Redistributable open data
Quality
QC clean · 0 failures
Format
Apache Parquet + dictionary

Safe to train on

Built only from a named, redistributable official source under a documented open licence - not scraped web data. No copyright grey zone, no personal data. Ships machine-readable Croissant metadata (ML Commons - loads in Hugging Face / Kaggle / Google), an AI training-licence manifest documenting source, licence and provenance for your model's data governance, and a machine-readable data dictionary (drop it into an agent / RAG prompt so the model knows every column) - all inspectable before you buy.

What's included

  • Every U.S. Title-IV college - one fat row: cost, earnings, completion, admissions, debt
  • Median graduate earnings 10yr out, net price, cost of attendance, median debt
  • Admission rate, median SAT/ACT, undergrad enrollment, retention & completion, Pell %
  • Ownership (public / private nonprofit / for-profit) mapped to readable labels
  • ~18 fields selected from a ~3,000-column raw CSV; institution-level, no student PII
  • Public domain + CC-BY (U.S. Dept. of Education) - free commercial reuse & resale
  • Source: U.S. Department of Education - College Scorecard

Schema

ColumnTypeDescriptionFilledDistinct
unitid int Federal IPEDS UNITID (primary key) 100.0% 6,273
institution str Institution name 100.0% 6,164
city str City 100.0% 2,342
state str U.S. state abbreviation 100.0% 59
ownership str Public / Private nonprofit / Private for-profit 100.0% 3
admission_rate float Undergraduate admission rate (0-1) 30.5% 1,520
sat_avg float Average SAT score of admitted students 16.5% 433
act_median float Median ACT composite score 15.5% 22
undergrad_enrollment float Undergraduate enrollment (headcount) 87.3% 2,707
cost_of_attendance float Average annual cost of attendance (USD) 51.0% 3,075
net_price_public float Average net price, public institutions (USD) 28.6% 1,720
net_price_private float Average net price, private institutions (USD) 51.6% 3,065
median_earnings_10yr float Median earnings 10 years after entry (USD) 81.7% 3,778
completion_rate_150pct float Completion rate within 150% of expected time (0-1) 36.1% 1,742
retention_rate float First-year retention rate, full-time (0-1) 32.8% 1,365
median_debt float Median debt of graduates (USD) 76.2% 1,621
pct_pell float Share of undergraduates receiving Pell grants (0-1) 86.8% 3,646

Sample & preview

Every purchase ships as Apache Parquet with a data dictionary and the full QC report. A free sample (first rows + schema) is downloadable here - confirm fit before you buy. Source: U.S. Dept. of Ed. (redistributable open data; attribution passes through - see our Licence).

Don't trust screenshots - drop the sample into your notebook right now.

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_parquet("us-college-outcomes_sample.parquet")
df.info()   # typed columns, gap-aware, ready to join
⬇ Download free Parquet sample or CSV for Excel