 Today, we're going to talk about the college scorecard, which is a part of the U.S. Department of Education's College Affordability and Transparency Center. And so first, what you're going to want to do is navigate to the U.S. Department of Education's College Cost and Transparency Center, which is at collegecost.ed.gov. This website provides a listing of resources available to you from the Department of Education that will help you better understand the outcomes and costs associated with various colleges and universities. So for example, you could go to College Navigator. This is a search tool that provides information to students and families about financial aid specific, about specific schools, their admissions rates, their graduation rates, things like that. So if you're starting your college search, this is a great place to start. There's also information about the Net Price Calculator Center. This will help you find links to an institution's Net Price Calculator. That's a tool that will help you estimate the price you will pay for college once financial aid is taken into account. So after you might get the Pell Grant, what your college cost would look like. But today we're going to talk about a new resource available this year to students and families to help them make better informed decisions about where to go to college. And this is the college scorecard. So what you're going to do is you're going to, you can either click here or you can click enter, and it will take you to the college scorecard's main page. And so this is the search page for the college scorecard, and it's meant to help students and families better understand a college's outcomes relative to its peers. So its graduation rate, its loan default rate, its cost, median borrowing, stuff like that. So you can search by entering the college's name at the top right here. So you could start typing, you know, university. For example, I'll do mine, university of, well, and you can make a misspelling. University of Wisconsin. And then your schools will come up and you could just click. I went to the University of Wisconsin. You could click in there and see the scorecard. I'm just going to take a while to load. And so this is what the scorecard will look like. So if you're just beginning your college search, you can also search by criteria using the boxes below here. For example, maybe you're interested in going to school close to home. And so you could look it up by zip code. So today we'll use a Washington DC zip code. So we'll put in 20010, which is Washington, DC, and maybe we'll put within 50 miles of that. And then we'll say add criteria and you'll see in the upper left-hand corner that it will list this criteria for you. And then maybe you're interested even more in the size of a school and you want to go to a very small or small school because you're hoping for a smaller class size. And so you can also add that criteria. And then you might want, you're only interested maybe in, for example, bachelor's degree. So you want to get a four-year degree. And so you can also add that criteria. And then you click search and you'll get a listing of schools that meet those criteria. And today we'll take a look at the University of the District of Columbia, which is Washington DC's public university. And so here's the scorecard for the University of the District of Columbia. The scorecard reports five data points for each university. This way you can compare various colleges' information. The five points are cost, graduation rate, loan, default rate, median borrowing, and employment. So I'm going to walk you through each one of these and what it means for you. So the first one is cost. And this is an in-state cost for full-time undergraduates. So this is the average net price. What you would be paying after grants are taken into account. And so this is, on average, what students will pay for their full education if they're a full-time student. So that's $16,084 at the University of the District of Columbia. And compared to its peers, so compared to other schools that are offering bachelor's degrees, that's about in the middle for what college costs are. And you can also here go to the net price calculator and enter in some of your own personal information and it will give you a more robust estimate of what you would owe at the University of District of Columbia if you're interested in that school. So the next data point is graduation rates. UDC's graduation rate is 8%, which is showing that it is relatively low according to its peers. And this might be because there is a caveat with this data point. This data is only measuring first-time students and those that are full-time enrolled. And it's the six-year graduation rate. And so UDC actually draws from students that are overwhelmingly not full-time or this might not be the first time they've enrolled, they might have transferred to UDC, so they're not included in the count. So the graduation rate might actually be higher or lower. These are just things to take into account when you are looking at this graduation rate. The next data point is the loan default rate. So this is how many students defaulted or could not pay back their loans three years after leaving the University of District of Columbia. So as you can see, UDC is a little bit higher than the national average, but not too much so. The next data point is median debt. So the total median debt for families that go to UDC upon graduation or upon leaving school is $8,525. This amounts to $98 per month for a 10-year standard repayment plan. There are other repayment plans open to students, and there's a link right here where you can learn about repayment options. And this is relatively low compared to other peers. What's important to remember is that this median debt is for borrowers, not for all students. So if you found the median for all students, it would certainly look different. But this helps to kind of guide you and give you an idea of what your debt may be if you borrow for your education and what your monthly payment would be under the standard repayment plan, which is 120 payments over 10 years, so one per month. And then the last data point is employment, which is not available yet. The Department of Education is working on it, and what they hope to see is maybe what the median or average, probably median salary, will be three years upon graduation for the institution for those students who borrowed student loans. So just to give you an idea of what the employment outcomes are for students who go to that school. So as you make your decision about where to go to college, it's important to be as well informed as possible. This means reviewing lots of free resources like this scorecard before making your choice and having an honest discussion with your family about costs, outcomes, and your expectations of going to college.