How the numbers are built

Definitions are easy to nod along to and hard to check. So every score below is worked through on the same real profile: the University of Vermont, a public university in Burlington with 11,743 undergraduates. Nothing here is invented. Each figure is the one the tool actually publishes, and you can open its live profile and check every one.

We picked a school with a full set of data, not a flattering one. Where Vermont has no value for a metric (it pays no endowment tax, it awards no short-term certificates) we work the example on a different real school and say which.

Seventeen public data sources, thirteen of them official federal collections, all free to access. The first two carry most of the figures. The rest add the policy, research, labor-market, safety and demographic signals. OpenAlex, Wikipedia and Wikidata are community-maintained, and we use them only where the institution matches with confidence:

The data is pre-built into static files from local copies of these releases. There are no live API calls, no tracking, and no exposed keys. The tool is just data and JavaScript. Null, suppressed (PrivacySuppressed) and blank values are treated as missing, never as zero. Several metrics are projections or scenarios, not current-period facts: the field-demand outlook (BLS, 2024-34), the enrollment cliff (WICHE projections), Grad PLUS exposure and the Parent PLUS cap gap (FSA volume read against the 2025 budget-law scenario), Workforce Pell exposure (certificate share read against the 2025 budget law's new short-term-Pell eligibility, effective July 1, 2026), and endowment-tax exposure (a 2025-budget-law scenario, not current law). The closure-risk score is a structural index, not a forecast. Each is flagged as indicative where it appears.

What it is. The set of schools a college is measured against. Almost every number in the tool is a rank inside this set, so the group decides what the number means.

How it is built. A single national percentile would be misleading, because a regional teaching college and a research flagship do not compete for the same students or the same money. So each school is placed in one of 64 peer groups, built from two facts it reports to the federal government:

• Carnegie Classification, what kind of school it is: doctoral/research, master's, baccalaureate, associate, special-focus and so on.
• Sector, who runs it: public, private nonprofit, or private for-profit.

Combine those two and you get the group. Percentiles and medians are computed only inside a school's own group, so the comparison is always like-for-like.

When a group would be too small. A rank against four other schools is noise, so a group needs at least 10 schools. If a Carnegie-and-sector combination has fewer, its members are moved to a wider group, in two steps:

1. 1Regroup by region and sector, for example "Public institutions in the Southeast region".
2. 2If that is still under 10, regroup by sector alone, for example "All private nonprofit institutions".

This is rare. Of the 64 groups, 58 are a straight Carnegie-and-sector match, 3 fall back to region and sector, and 3 fall back to sector alone. Every profile names its own group and the number of schools in it, so you can always see which one applied.

The honest limit. A peer group is a starting point, not a claim that 93 schools are interchangeable. Size, state funding and mission still vary inside a group. The tool also offers a separate "nearest neighbors" set on each profile, matched on size, selectivity, cost, outcomes and student mix, for when the fixed group is too coarse.

What it is. A percentile is a class rank. It answers one question: what share of this school's peers sit at or below it on this measure? A 97th percentile means 97% of the group is at or below it.

Percentile is not the same as good. Higher is not always better: a high median debt or a high net price is bad news. So we translate the raw percentile into a standing using each metric's direction:

For metrics where lower is better (debt, net price, default rate) the standing is flipped, so "Strong" always means "doing well", never just "a big number". Some metrics are neutral (enrollment size, Pell share). Those get a percentile but no good/bad standing, because more is not inherently better or worse.

The honest limit. A percentile says where a school sits, not whether the whole group is healthy. If every school in a group is under strain, ranking first in it is still a rank, not a clean bill of health.

What it is. The headline financial score, and the one number here that is not an Ibex invention. It is the NACUBO Composite Financial Index (CFI), the balance-sheet measure accreditors and college boards already use, and whose underlying ratios bond-rating agencies track. Unlike a percentile, it is an absolute score: it says how strong the balance sheet is, not how it ranks.

How it is built. Four ratios come out of the IPEDS finance filing. Each is converted to a "strength factor" on a common scale, then blended by fixed weights onto one scale running from about −4 (weak) to 10 (strong):

Reading the scale:

The honest limits. Below 3 falls short of the conventional threshold for financial health; below 1 signals acute stress. Schools carrying little or no building debt have the viability ratio dropped and the other weights re-normalized. The CFI is computed from IPEDS FY2022-23 and lags the current year by two to three years. It is calculated for public (GASB) and private nonprofit (FASB) institutions. Private for-profit colleges report under a different FASB standard with no comparable net-asset or reserve concept, so they get an operating margin, tuition dependency and revenue composition but no Composite Financial Index. Branch campuses that report finances at a parent or system level can show distorted ratios. Where a branch, online division or other child unit files no IPEDS finance survey of its own, its profile shows the parent or system's figures, labeled as such and left out of rankings and peer percentiles so the same finances are never counted twice. It is for informational benchmarking, not a credit rating, and not financial advice.

What it is. The 0–100 gauge on each profile. It is a class rank, not a health grade: it says how a school's per-student finances compare with its own peer group. 91 does not mean "91% healthy". It means "near the top of this group". A school can score high in a weak group, and a strong school can score middling in an elite one.

How it is built. Up to three per-student measures from the IPEDS finance filing. Each is turned into a percentile inside the school's peer group, and the score is the average of the percentiles it has. Higher is stronger. No weighting, no adjustment, no hidden inputs:

• Endowment per undergraduate, the cushion behind each student.
• Net tuition revenue per FTE, what it actually collects per student after discounts.
• Instructional spend per FTE, what it puts back into teaching per student.

The honest limits. Most scores are built from two inputs, not three, and that is the norm rather than the exception. Of the 5,745 institutions in the tool, 5,719 carry a score and 26 are suppressed for reporting none of the inputs. Of those 5,719, 3,322 (58%) are scored on two inputs and 2,397 on all three. The missing input is always the same one: endowment per undergraduate. Every for-profit lacks it, which is faithful rather than a gap, since they hold no endowment; the rest are publics and nonprofits whose endowment is not in the filing. A two-input score and a three-input score look identical on the gauge, so check the components shown beneath it.

This also bites inside a group: in 42 of the 64 groups, some schools are scored on three inputs and others on two. Where that happens the scores are ranked on the same scale but are not built from the same measures, so a close gap between two schools in a mixed group is weaker evidence than the same gap in a group where everyone reports the same things.

And because it is a rank, the same dollars produce very different scores in different peer groups. For an absolute read on financial strength, use the Financial Health Index instead.

What it is. A 0–100 index where higher means more structural pressure. It screens for the financial and demographic strain that has historically come before closures and mergers. It is not a prediction that any school will close, not a credit rating, and not a forecast.

How it is built. Four signals. Each is converted to its own 0–100 pressure reading on a fixed, published scale, and the index is the plain average of whichever are available. At least two must be present, otherwise the score is suppressed:

The honest limits. Equal weights are a choice, not a finding: we have no evidence that these four pressures matter equally, and we do not pretend otherwise. The scale endpoints are judgment calls, published above so you can disagree with them. Both money signals come from FY2022-23 filings, and the cliff is a projection to 2041. It is a signal to investigate, never a verdict.

What it is. Two different measures of student success, because the federal government measures it two different ways, on different students, over different time windows. They are not directly comparable, and a school can look very different on each. We show both, side by side, on every profile.

Both families are reported by the U.S. Department of Education and lag the current year by roughly two to three years.

What it is. Four signals modelling how a school could be affected by the 2025 federal budget law. Read them as "here is the size of the exposure if this lands as written". They are scenario estimates, not current law, and not a bill anyone has received.

What it is. The "Top fields of study" section on each profile, which asks whether a school's individual majors pay off. It rolls up College Scorecard Field-of-Study data to the CIP 2-digit family and, when you expand a field, drills into its individual 4-digit-CIP majors. That is the finest grain ED publishes, since there is no 6-digit earnings series.

Completions come from eight dated yearly releases (2014-15 through 2022-23). Median earnings one and four years after completion are completion-weighted averages of program medians. ED moved debt and the earnings-threshold counts out of the latest dated files, so those come from the Most-Recent-Cohorts snapshot. Each 4-digit major links to a national field-of-study page ranking every U.S. college offering it. Major-level figures appear only where enough graduates exist to clear ED's privacy threshold, so many cells read "–".

• Earnings-premium test and the 2-of-3 mechanic. Compares a program's median earnings four years out against the ACS median for a high-school graduate (undergraduate credentials) or a bachelor's holder (graduate credentials) in the school's state. The 2 of 3 yrs badge flags a program that came in below that benchmark in two of its latest three reported cohort-years, which is the statutory trigger under the 2025 federal earnings-premium test (effective July 1, 2026), under which a program can lose Title IV eligibility. Indicative only: ED's official determination uses its own cohort definition and may differ.
• Threshold pass-rate (% > threshold). ED's own share of a program's graduates earning above the federal earnings threshold: the above-threshold count divided by the measured-earnings cohort. This is the literal "do-no-harm" pass rate the 2025 test refers to. ED publishes it sparsely and in different measurement windows across releases (the 4-year window appears only in the most-recent snapshot; 5- and 1-year windows appear in other files), so we pool all nine Field-of-Study releases and report each program from the best available window: 4-year preferred, then 5-year, then 1-year. A small chip marks any figure not on the 4-year window, and hovering names the cohort size and source release. Every cell is real ED-published data with no imputation, and pooling raises coverage from roughly one program in five to about five in six.
• Debt-to-earnings. Median student debt at completion divided by median earnings four years out, a gainful-employment-style value ratio. Below 0.5× shows green, above 1.0× red.

What it is. A forward-looking read on whether the jobs a school's degrees feed are growing or shrinking. It is the projected 10-year (2024-34) change in U.S. employment for those occupations, from BLS Employment Projections, mapped through the NCES CIP-SOC crosswalk and weighted by the school's own program mix. The benchmark is the U.S. all-occupations projection of +3.1%.

Three fields are excluded because their crosswalk maps to "any job" and carries no coherent occupational signal: 05 Area/Ethnic/Gender Studies, 24 Liberal Arts & Humanities, and 30 Multi/Interdisciplinary. Excluding them is a judgment call, and it means a school heavily weighted toward those fields has a thinner signal here than the number suggests. It is indicative, and never a guarantee.

What it is. Short warnings that surface a pattern one number alone would hide: multi-year enrollment decline, heavy debt-to-earnings burden, or an unusually large endowment draw for the school's size, for example. Flags are fixed rules, not judgment and not AI. Each one is either true of the data or it is not. They are colour-coded amber (watch) or red (acute), and shown only when the underlying data supports them.

They are signals to investigate, not verdicts, and a flag is never a claim about an institution's future.

The profile view offers four optional lenses: Enrollment VP, CFO, President, and Board / Trustee. A lens never changes a single number. It reorders the metric cards, stars (★) the measures that role watches most, and opens on the most relevant tab. It is presentation over identical data, so two colleagues can read the same profile through the lens that matches their job.

The leaderboards rank on one disclosed metric at a time. No weighting, no composite, no editorial judgment. Schools that do not report the metric are left out. To stop tiny programs distorting the lists, balance-sheet rankings (financial health, endowment per student) require at least 1,000 undergraduates, and enrollment-growth lists require a meaningful starting base. Each list states its own filter in a note. These are data rankings, not endorsements.

• It is not a credit rating or investment advice. The CFI tracks ratios similar to those agencies use, but it is not a rating and carries no opinion on any security.
• It is not a "best colleges" ranking. There is no overall quality score and no weighting of one metric against another.
• The data lags. Scorecard figures trail the current year by about 2 years; IPEDS finance by 2 to 3. Every metric is labeled with its source year, so check the label before quoting it.
• Most scores are ranks, not grades. Financial Resilience and the percentile standings say where a school sits among its peers. They do not say the peer group itself is healthy.
• System reporting can distort. Branch campuses that file finances at a parent/system level may show ratios that do not reflect the individual campus. Where a child unit files no finance of its own, its profile shows the parent/system figures, labeled as such and left out of rankings and peer percentiles.
• Small cohorts are suppressed. Federal privacy rules withhold earnings and debt for small programs. Those cells show as missing, never as zero.
• Blank does not mean clean. On the Single Audit metrics especially, an empty value means the school filed no audit, not that the audit found nothing.