How to read these numbers

Acceptance rate

Measures demand and marketing reach. It is not a quality score.

A school admitting 4% of applicants is not four times better than one admitting 16%. It is a school that received more applications relative to the seats it has, which is driven as much by name recognition, application fee waivers and Common App reach as by anything happening in its classrooms.

What the number is genuinely good for is placing a school on your child’s list. If your child’s grades and scores sit inside the admitted range, it is a target. If they sit below the 25th percentile, it is a reach, and a list of reaches is not a list. Every family needs at least two schools where admission is close to certain and the cost is already affordable.

One caveat that catches people out: a published rate covers all applicants to the whole institution. Individual programmes, nursing and engineering especially, are often far more selective than the school-wide figure suggests.

Net price against sticker price

Net price is what families actually paid. Sticker price is what almost nobody pays in full.

Published tuition is the price of instruction before any aid. Average net price is the total cost of attendance, tuition plus housing, books and fees, minus the grants and scholarships students actually received. It is reported to the federal government by the institution, and it is the only one of the two numbers worth comparing between schools.

The gap between them routinely runs to tens of thousands of dollars a year, and it is not evenly distributed. A well-endowed private university with a $65,000 sticker price can cost a middle-income family less than a public university out of state, because the private school has the money to discount and the public one does not.

Average net price is still an average. A family well above or below the median income at that school will pay something different, which is what the school’s own Net Price Calculator, required by law and linked from every admissions site, exists to estimate.

Why the same degree has two prices

State governments subsidise residents at their public universities.

At a public university the in-state and out-of-state figures are for identical instruction, identical faculty and an identical diploma. The difference is which taxpayers funded the seat.

At the schools with the widest gaps, the out-of-state premium alone exceeds the entire tuition bill at a mid-priced private college. That makes residency worth checking before a family becomes attached to an out-of-state flagship, and it makes the in-state option at home worth a serious look even when it was not the first choice.

Middle-50 test ranges

The range of scores among admitted students, not a cutoff.

A middle-50 range names the 25th and 75th percentile scores of enrolled students. A quarter of admitted students scored below the bottom number. Those students were admitted for something else: a recruited sport, a rare talent, a state the school wants represented, a first-generation background, or simply a stronger transcript.

The practical read is positional. Above the 75th percentile, the score is helping the application. Inside the range, it is neutral and the transcript decides. Below the 25th, the score is working against an application that needs to be strong elsewhere.

Test-optional complicates this. Where a school is genuinely test-optional, the published range describes only the students who chose to submit, which skews it upward. Check the current policy on the school’s own admissions site before deciding whether to send a score, because policies have changed year to year since 2020.

Retention and graduation rates

The most overlooked numbers, and better predictors of outcome than acceptance rate.

Freshman retention is the share of first-year students who come back for a second year. Four-year and six-year graduation rates are the share who finish in that time. Together they answer a question acceptance rate cannot: do the students who go here stay, and do they finish?

A low retention rate is a warning about advising, affordability or fit, and it shows up before anything else does. A six-year graduation rate far above the four-year rate usually means students are taking an extra year or two, which is one or two more years of cost that no sticker price shows.

Read them against the school’s selectivity. Highly selective schools graduate almost everyone, partly because they admit students who were always going to finish. The interesting cases are open-access schools with unusually strong rates, which says something real about how they support students.

Admission factors

The school’s own statement of what it weighs, in its own words.

Schools that publish a Common Data Set rate each factor they consider as very important, important, considered or not considered. This is not an outside interpretation: it is the institution telling the federal reporting system how it reviews applications, and it is the closest thing to an official answer a family can get.

Read the top row first. A school rating rigour of secondary school record as very important is telling you the transcript decides, and that a harder schedule with a slightly lower grade usually beats the reverse. A school rating standardised test scores as considered rather than very important is telling you a strong score helps but will not rescue a weak transcript.

What sits in the lower rows matters too. Demonstrated interest rated as considered means campus visits, opened emails and interviews are being counted. Rated as not considered, they are not, and a family can stop spending money on visits meant to signal enthusiasm.

Schools that do not publish a Common Data Set show no factor table here, because inventing one would be worse than showing nothing.

Popular majors and the earnings column

Where a school concentrates its teaching, and what its graduates earned.

Popularity is measured by the number of students who actually graduate in each field per year, not by how many enrol or how the school markets itself. A field with a large graduating cohort usually has the deepest course catalogue, the most faculty and the largest peer group, which matters more to a student’s daily experience than the department’s reputation.

The earnings figure beside each major is the median for graduates of that programme at that school, measured five years after they entered. It is a real outcome rather than a projection, but it reflects who enrols as much as what is taught: a school drawing from wealthier feeder schools posts higher earnings for reasons that have little to do with the teaching.

Use it to compare the same major across schools, not different majors at one school. Engineering will out-earn education everywhere, and that comparison tells you nothing about either department.

Clery Act campus safety figures

Rates per 1,000 students, never raw counts.

Every college receiving federal aid must publish annual crime statistics under the Clery Act, covering offences on campus, in nearby public areas and in university housing.

Raw counts are close to useless for comparison, because a university of 40,000 mechanically reports more incidents than a college of 2,000 with an identical safety record. Per-1,000-student rates are the only comparable form, which is why they are what the profiles show.

Reporting rates are themselves a signal, and an ambiguous one. A school with strong reporting culture and well-publicised support services can post higher numbers than a school where fewer incidents are reported at all. A conspicuously low figure at a large university is worth a question rather than reassurance.

Where the figures come from

Four public sources, none of them a rankings table.

Acceptance rates, test ranges, tuition, average net price and Pell participation come from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard and from IPEDS, the federal reporting every institution is required to file.

Admission factors, the school’s own statement of what it weighs, along with retention, graduation and waitlist figures, come from the Common Data Set where a school publishes one. Not every school does, and those pages show less as a result rather than showing an estimate.

Campus safety comes from Clery Act disclosures. Career earnings and outlook figures elsewhere on the site come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and O*NET.

Nothing here is a ranking, and no figure is Solyo’s own estimate. Where a number is missing, the page says so instead of filling the gap.