ED Adds New Low Earnings Indicator to 2026-27 FAFSA
By Jill Desjean, Director of Policy Analysis
The Department of Education (ED) on Monday announced a new transparency initiative incorporated into the 2026-27 FAFSA, which will provide undergraduate applicants with a new low earnings indicator on the FAFSA Submission Summary (FSS) for any institutions they have listed to receive their FAFSA data whose graduates’ typical earnings fall below a set threshold.
The indicator was added on December 7, 2025, and appears only for applicants who indicate they are first-year undergraduate students. The indicator is set on the FSS when a student selects an institution to receive their FAFSA data, and that school’s graduates’ median earnings are lower than those of typical high school graduates in the same state, or lower than those of typical high school graduates nationally if the school serves primarily out-of-state students.
The indicator appears as a yellow text box that reads, “Some of Your Selected Schools Show Lower Earnings.” Students can click a box titled “See These Schools,” which will take them to a page that displays the median earnings for all of the schools they listed, with a yellow flag for the institutions with low earnings. The low earnings indicator is based on institution-level data, not program-level data, and uses College Scorecard earnings figures adjusted for inflation to June 2025 dollars, which will be updated as more recent data becomes available.
Much of College Scorecard data comes from institutional reports to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Earnings data are based on undergraduate completers’ earnings who were working and not enrolled in college four years post-graduation. It excludes institutions in American Samoa, Guam, Marshall Islands, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands; institutions with no published median earnings data for the 2014-25 pooled cohort of completers; and institutions conferring only graduate degrees. The earnings data comes from the United States Census Bureau American Community Survey median earnings of employed high school graduates between the ages of 25 and 34 with non-zero earnings, whose highest level of education is a high school diploma or equivalent.
“The earnings indicator should not be interpreted as the Department passing normative judgment on what institutions are worthy of attendance, or the expected return on investment of attending a particular institution,” ED noted in the announcement. ED added that, since the indicator appears after the FAFSA has been processed, it will not impact FAFSA completion rates or Institutional Student Information Record (ISIR) submissions.
ED is also making institutions’ earnings data, including which institutions are flagged as having low earnings, available for download, to help institutions easily look up their data.
Publication Date: 12/9/2025
Alice B | 12/9/2025 11:35:55 AM
“The earnings indicator should not be interpreted as the Department passing normative judgment on what institutions are worthy of attendance, or the expected return on investment of attending a particular institution,” - oh, but you are.....
As a specialty school, we do not, nor will we claim to be a high earnings institution. Our goal is not to train students to go out into the world to make an impression, but to go out to make a difference.
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