College ROI Scraper — US College Scorecard Earnings, Cost & Debt Data

Extract a complete, structured dataset of every college and university in the United States from the official U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard. This Actor turns the government's API into clean JSON, CSV, or Excel — including the numbers students and analysts actually care about: tuition, net price, median student debt, median graduate earnings, admission rates, completion rates, and a computed earnings-to-debt ROI ratio.

The College Scorecard is maintained by the federal government and updated annually, so the data is authoritative and fresh — far more reliable than scraping individual university websites.

What you can extract

Field	Description
name	Institution name
city / state / zip	Location
website	School homepage
ownership	Public / Private nonprofit / Private for-profit
studentSize	Undergraduate enrollment
admissionRate	Overall admission rate
tuitionInState / tuitionOutOfState	Published tuition
avgNetPrice	Average net price after aid
medianDebt	Median debt of completers
medianEarnings10yr	Median earnings 10 years after entry
completionRate4yr	4-year completion rate
earningsToDebtRatio	Computed ROI (earnings ÷ debt)

Why scrape College Scorecard data?

This is a pricing-and-value intelligence tool, not just a school list. EdTech companies, student-loan and financial-aid firms, enrollment-marketing agencies, journalists, and researchers pay for clean, comparable college outcome data. The built-in earnings-to-debt ROI ratio lets you instantly rank schools by financial value — the single most-requested analysis in higher-ed data.

How to scrape college data

1. Click Start.
2. (Optional) Add your free api.data.gov key (sign up at https://api.data.gov/signup/) for large pulls. Leave blank to use the built-in DEMO_KEY for small runs.
3. (Optional) Filter by State or Name.
4. Set Max Results (0 = all schools).
5. Toggle Include LLM-Ready Markdown for AI/RAG pipelines.
6. Run and download as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Input example

{
  "apiKey": "",
  "state": "CA",
  "maxResults": 500,
  "includeMarkdown": false
}

Output example

{
  "name": "Example State University",
  "city": "Sacramento",
  "state": "CA",
  "ownership": "Public",
  "tuitionInState": 10024,
  "avgNetPrice": 14500,
  "medianDebt": 18000,
  "medianEarnings10yr": 52000,
  "earningsToDebtRatio": 2.89
}

Pricing

Billed per result plus Apify compute. A full national pull is only a few dollars. Note: the shared DEMO_KEY is rate-limited — supply your own free api.data.gov key for unlimited large pulls.

LLM-ready output

Enable Include LLM-Ready Markdown to attach a clean, semantic Markdown summary to each school for direct use in Claude, GPT, Gemini, or any RAG/vector pipeline.

Related Actors

Explore our other US government and education data scrapers on the Apify Store.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No — a built-in DEMO_KEY works for small runs. For large pulls, get a free key at api.data.gov.

How fresh is the data? It reflects the latest annual College Scorecard release.

What does the ROI ratio mean? Median 10-year graduate earnings divided by median student debt — higher is better.

Legal disclaimer

This Actor extracts only publicly available, non-personal institutional data published by the U.S. Department of Education. It does not collect personal data of individuals. Use the data in compliance with applicable laws and the api.data.gov terms of service. Provided for legitimate business, research, and analytical purposes.