The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
“Americans know that colleges bring value, but that value is not going evenly to everyone,” said Patrick Methvin, director of the postsecondary success in the United States program at the Gates Foundation. “Institutions need to know their numbers to see existing gaps in how they are serving specific populations. And to use that information to change their policies and practices.”
Called the Equitable Value Explorer, the easy-to-use tool came out of the Postsecondary Value Commission, a national working group managed by IHEP and supported by the Foundation since the Commission started in 2019.
“We’re still in a place where a white adult is twice as likely to have an associate’s degree as a Latinx adult,” said Mamie Voight, interim president at IHEP. “The tool is designed for institutional leaders to use a better, fairer system for everyone. Colleges and universities are not solely responsible for righting all of the wrongs of economic and social injustices, but there is a lot that can be done.”
The Explorer uses public data from more than 4,000 postsecondary institutions based on the Department of Education’s College Scorecard. This data includes information like the cost of attendance, graduation rate, employment rate, and the percentage of students who receive Pell Grants, a federal aid program for low-income students.
However, Voight stressed that the existing national data lacks key information. For example, College Scorecard includes the median earnings of people 10 years after enrollment in an undergraduate program. But those numbers are not broken down by race or gender for each college. Such information is only available at institutions where at least half of undergraduate enrollment identifies as part of that group.
Yet the Explorer also features more extensive data from the University of Texas (UT) system as a possible model for other institutions to fill these gaps.
