Public-data project · free forever
The honest number behind US education.
Truewise turns scattered US federal education data into clear, honest guidance for students and families. We replace the scary or hidden number, such as the sticker price or the anecdote, with the real one, drawn straight from public data.
Building in the open. First module: Value Check.
What's coming
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First up
Value Check
Look up a college program and see, in plain language, whether its graduates typically earn more than a high-school graduate, and how their debt compares to their earnings. Mirrors the federal Financial Value Transparency framework.
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Affordability
What families at your income level actually paid, not the sticker price.
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ROI
Field-of-study earnings versus debt, and roughly how long a degree takes to pay off.
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Mobility
Schools with a track record of moving students up, including the hidden gems.
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Careers
Where a major actually leads: real jobs, real wages, real demand.
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K-12
Advanced-course access, beating-the-odds schools, and unclaimed financial aid.
Open data, not another comparison site
Truewise is open data infrastructure that researchers and journalists can build on. The website is the demo layer. Everything is drawn from public federal sources (College Scorecard, IPEDS, Federal Student Aid, and more), cleaned into one documented dataset, and published under an open license with a reproducible pipeline.
A clean, joined dataset, a Python package, and dated snapshots of the government's own transparency figures are on the way. This page will link them as they ship.
Methodology
Every number will carry its source and cohort year. We never impute suppressed or missing values; where the data is too thin to be honest, the page says “insufficient data.” Earnings and aid figures reflect the recent past, so they are framed as “students like you earned or paid roughly,” never as a promise. A full methodology write-up will live here once the first module ships.