Solyo Standing: how Solyo measures what happens to a college’s students

What Solyo Standing is

Solyo Standing answers one question: how do this college’s students do? It reads six measures the U.S. Department of Education publishes for every college, graduate pay four years after finishing and ten years after entering, the six-year graduation rate, first-year retention, and the share of federal loans being repaid or in default three years out, and places each college against the others in its peer group.

It is not a measure of reputation, selectivity or spending. A college is not placed higher for admitting fewer students or for having a larger endowment. Those facts are shown beside the standing where they help a family, and they never move it.

The school tier

Colleges are compared within their Carnegie class, the public classification of U.S. colleges by what they teach and award, so that a liberal arts college is measured against colleges and a research university against research universities.

Each measure becomes a percentile within the peer group. The composite is the weighted mean of the percentiles present; a missing measure drops out and the remaining weights rescale, so a college is never punished for a figure the government did not publish.

The composite percentile sets the tier: Top 5%, Top 10%, Top 25% or Top half of the peer group. Below the median no tier is shown and the measures stand on their own. A college needs at least 100 bachelor’s degrees a year for a school-wide tier; smaller colleges show their measures and their standing by major.

Pay is scored at national prices, divided by the state’s regional price parity from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (2024), so a Texas college and a New York college compare on buying power. The dollar figure you see is always the published one.

Standing in a major

A major is a family of federal program codes, because the same subject is filed under different codes from one college to the next. Every program in the family with at least 20 graduates a year is scored against the others nationwide on graduate pay, graduation rate, retention, pay against debt and program size, with weights that depend on the kind of major: career majors count pay more, graduate-school-path majors count completion more, and mission and creative majors do not score pay at all.

Some colleges teach a major inside a broader degree: finance inside a business degree, for example. Federal data then has no finance row for them. Solyo scores those colleges on the broader degree and says so, so a family is not told a strong program does not exist. Where the government suppresses a program’s pay figure because the cohort is small, Solyo estimates it from related figures and marks it as estimated. An estimated figure never carries a program above Top 25% where pay is scored; the position is still shown.

A major gets a public list when 20 or more programs qualify. The result shows two ways: a tier chip on the tile (Top 10% in finance) and a position with its denominator on the pages (#11 of 354 finance programs).

What is shown but never scored

Admit rate, test score ranges, net price, class size, endowment and instructional spending are shown on college pages because families ask about them. None of them enters the standing. Rewarding exclusivity or wealth would measure whom a college admits and what it owns, not what happens to its students.

Solyo reads no outside ranking, publishes none, and compares itself to none.

Known limits

Outcome measures reflect where students started as much as what the college did. Colleges that enroll many lower-income students, or whose graduates go on to medical, law and doctoral programs before earning, can land lower than their reputation would suggest. Solyo shows the admit rate beside the tier for that reason and does not fold it in.

Federal pay figures cover graduates who received federal aid, so colleges with few such students have thinner data. Service academies, whose graduates are not federal borrowers, and graduate-only campuses with no first-year class cannot be scored and are shown without a tier. Online-only institutions and institutions outside the 50 states and DC are not scored.

Some multi-campus systems report graduate pay for the whole system against each campus, so a small campus can carry the system’s pay figure. Solyo shows those rows as published; the next federal data release carries the parent-campus flag that lets them be read per campus.

Federal nursing data does not separate four-year programs that prepare new nurses from completion programs for nurses who already hold a license. A completion program’s graduates were earning a nurse’s pay before they enrolled, so it can stand high on pay. Where Solyo knows a program is a completion program, it says so beside the position.