Western Accreditor Launches New ROI Tool
Josh Moody
August 6, 2025
he Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission is expanding its dashboard to provide more details about the outcomes at institutions accredited by the organization, a move intended to provide clear data about student’s return on investment.
The Key Indicators Dashboard, dubbed KID, includes metrics on student debt, earnings and other measures to help understand institutional performance, including at the program level. Now the accreditor has added a new Price–to–Earnings Premium metric to the dashboard, which tracks how long it takes for graduates from different programs to recover educational costs.
WSCUC officials said the PEP metric will help universities, students and lawmakers better understand how specific programs compare within institutions and to national benchmarks. The change comes as the federal government looks to require all programs to pass an earnings test in order to qualify for federal student loans.
