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Imagine you are an 18 year old graduating from high school this May. You've made your college choice already based mostly on location, the school's football team, family ties, and money. Wouldn't you like to know whether that choice was a good one, whether kids just like you who had made the same decision in years prior turned out successful? That they'd been able to transfer their AP credits, enroll in regular coursework, begin accumulating credits, and earn good GPAs? Did they like the school and were they successful enough to return another year?

In some places, you can actually find this information already. North Carolina, for example, maintains interactive Web sites for prospective freshmen and transfer students that enable students to see how their peers performed at their new school. Students can see, for example, the average GPA among students transferring from Catawba Valley Community College to another state institution; the average credit hours those students completed after arriving; the number of students taking English, math/science, and social science classes; the average GPA earned; and the percentage of students in good academic standing at the end of the year. Similar information can be found for individual high schools.

I recently shared the high school site with a North Carolina teacher. She was astonished it existed and thrilled to be able to use it. She can now show it to her students considering where to attend school next year or to her administrators to demonstrate how well (or poorly) their kids perform at the next level.

Yet, too few people know about these resources. They're buried on the University of North Carolina System Web site, and I wouldn't have found them if I hadn't been explicitly looking. They also have some jargon--they refer to "Transfer Student Performance" as TSP reports, which means nothing and is a serious barrier to a layperson (and whose cousin was mocked in Office Space). And, even when you find the information, it comes in an ugly computer-printout-circa-1987 style.

In an era where college access and completion are more important than ever, it's vital to get this information in the hands of students. That requires better data for most states, because far too few have such capacity. States like North Carolina are leaders in this area and should be commended, but even they need to make a concerted effort to get the information to students making choices. Or else, as in the past, they'll base their decisions on other, less important things.