The New York Times has released a new search tool that lets people look up how much money they can expect to earn based on their majors and which college they attended or would like to attend.
If the search tool sounds similar to The College Scorecard – the federal website meant to provide information such as graduation rates and earnings for graduates from specific institutions – that’s because the tool is based on an analysis performed by the HEA Group, which was founded by Michael Itzkowitz, who served as director of the College Scorecard website during the Obama administration.
The new search tool is being touted as one that can help prospective undergraduates more easily do side-by-side comparisons as they figure out which college to attend or at least try to get in.
“Your school can make a big difference — or matter very little — depending on the major,” the authors of The New York Times article about the new search tool wrote.
“A graduate who studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University earned roughly $10,000 more than a graduate from the University of Alabama,” they wrote. “That difference is over $150,000 if those same graduates studied computer science.”
The tool is based on an analysis of data being collected by the federal government to establish which programs and institutions are paying off.
Under the Student Tuition and Transparency System (STATS) and Earnings Accountability rule, undergraduate programs must show that their graduates earn more than the typical high school graduate. If a program fails in this regard for two out of three consecutive award years, the program will lose eligibility to participate in the federal student loan program. If a program fails for three years to meet the earnings criteria, the program could also lose eligibility for Title IV of the Higher Education Act, which governs financial aid, including Pell grants.
While the new college search tool is one of several designed to give students and families a better sense of what kind of salary they can expect based on the college or university they select, some research has shown that such tools often don’t affect the college choices of students from families of lesser economic means. For instance, after the College Scorecard made its debut in 2013 and again with enhanced data in 2015, researchers found that the students most responsive to the data were mostly from well-resourced high schools and higher-earning families.
More recently, however, AI has been “transforming the way students discover, evaluate, and choose colleges,” education company EAB found in a national survey of more than 5,000 high school students. “The survey shows 46 percent of students now use AI tools such as ChatGPT during their college search, up sharply from 26 percent in spring 2025,” EAB found in a 2026 report. “Nearly one in five students (18 percent) removed a college from consideration based on information surfaced through AI-generated search results.”
