Trends over time, part 2: scores, students, outcomes, Explore, and Compare

What's new

More history on each profile:

• Test scores: SAT and ACT middle-50% ranges against the median college. The line breaks at the new SAT in fall 2017, and years when scores weren't required are shaded.
• Students: undergraduate enrollment back to 1996, and race and ethnicity from fall 2010.
• Outcomes: graduation within six years by the class that entered each year, and median debt.
• "Since" lines with small sparklines under the Admissions, Students, and Cost takeaways.

A third Home fact: 66% of colleges required the SAT or ACT in fall 2019, and 5% did in fall 2024.

Across colleges:

• Explore: a "Show 10-year changes" switch adds sortable columns for cost, acceptance rate, and applicants. Colleges too small for a meaningful change are left out.
• Compare: a "Then & now" chart for cost, acceptance rate, applicants, or undergraduates.
• Profiles: at most one trend highlight, for colleges in the national top 5%, such as "Applications doubled since fall 2014".

Behind the scenes

• Every college now has history. A new trends summary in the dataset holds each college's 10-year changes, and a test checks it against the history files.
• The cross-check against the Urban Institute now covers graduation rates, and it fails if a check finds nothing to compare. That is how an off-by-one year was caught.
• Fallbacks for outages: cached federal files, and a saved inflation table when the BLS daily limit is hit.