One of the Obama administration’s flagship educational initiatives has been pushing colleges and universities to be more transparent about the return students can expect on their sizable investment to attend them. This makes sense: College is expensive, and students shouldn’t go into one blind to the hard data on their likely post-graduation fortunes.

In this sense, the University of Maryland got some good news this week. The U.S. Department of Education, as part of its College Scorecard initiative, named our College Park campus as one of 15 public four-year colleges to stand out in two key criteria: post-grad earnings and graduation rates. And the school was excited about it, too:

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[ READ MORE: University of Maryland alumni earn second-highest salaries in Big Ten ]

To measure how much graduates make, the Education Department looks at their median annual earnings 10 years after collecting their degrees. And to measure graduation success itself, the department leans on a 150 percent completion rate, better understood at a four-year college as the percentage of students who graduate within six years of matriculating.

 Institution

10-year earnings

Six-year graduation rate

Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus

$74,000 

 80.7%

University of California-Berkeley

$62,700 

90.9% 

University of California-San Diego

$59,600 

86.0% 

University of California-Los Angeles

$59,200 

90.9% 

University of Maryland-College Park

$59,100 

83.1% 

University of Virginia-Main Campus

$58,600 

93.2% 

SUNY at Binghamton

$59,400 

80.1% 

University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

$57,900

 90.3%

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

$57,900

 82.6%

University of California-Davis

$57,100

81.3% 

The College of New Jersey

$56,800

 85.7%

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

$56,600

83.9% 

College of William and Mary 

$56,400

89.9% 

University of California-Irvine

$55,800

 85.7%

Rutgers University-New Brunswick 

$54,800

79.5% 

By these metrics, Terps are succeeding. A full 83 percent of us graduate in that six-year window, and we can be reasonably expected to earn $59,100 per year, a decade after picture-taking time at the ‘M’ circle or fountain on McKeldin Mall. There are about 600 public four-year institutions nationwide, and we’re in the top 15. This is good!

Individually, Maryland’s done pretty well in both of these categories.

Let’s start with graduation rate. The Education Department’s very same scorecard program tell us that Maryland is 13th among four-year, public institutions in graduation rate. And when it comes to average earnings 10 years after graduating, we place 33rd among the same set of schools. That’s not quite as high (and it’s squarely outside the top 15), but it’s still strong.

The Education Department queries 588 schools classified as both “four-year” and “public,” so Maryland’s in the 94th percentile on income and the 98th percentile in graduation rate.

At least some of the enthusiasm about this (there should be some, anyway) is worth tempering. The average cost of living in Washington (the closest major city to College Park) is significantly higher than that to live in the closest major city to most of our peers in this new top 15. But not all of them: Graduates of California-Davis average about $2,000 fewer per year than Maryland grads, even though their school neighbors San Francisco — one of just six cities in U.S. states that are pricier than nearby Washington.

Maryland’s high postgrad salary is surely influenced by geography. No matter what sort of cost-of-living adjustment you’re looking for, $60,000 doesn’t go as far between Washington and Baltimore as it does between, say, Little Rock and Nashville. But Terps are still graduating and making money, and that’s still worthy of a tip of the cap.