US Colleges
Why graduation-rate floors belong in hard filters
Completion is not prestige. Cutting the bottom of the distribution changes every soft score that follows.
September 30, 2026
Soft weights only re-score schools that survive hard filters. A graduation-rate floor removes campuses that fail your completion bar before affordability or earnings get a vote. That is intentional: you should not “discover” a school you already refuse on completion.
How to set it
- In the engine, move min graduation rate to a floor you mean — then watch the pool shrink.
- For a pure leaderboard view, open highest graduation rate or highest retention.
- Remember small-college volatility — methodology excludes very small schools from some outcome lists for a reason.