The 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.

WSCUC officials cast the introduction of PEP as an effort to provide more transparency about outcomes and questions related to ROI, which have escalated as tuition costs continue to rise. A news release about the change noted that WSCUC is the first institutional accreditor to use an ROI metric in its public dashboards.

“As conversations about the cost and value of higher education continue, we’re responding with data and new pathways for institutions to develop innovative programs that are responsive to today’s student and labor market needs,” WSCUC president Maria Toyoda said in a news release announcing the expanded dashboard. “The expansion of outcomes data in KID provides employers, families, and taxpayers a fuller picture of what students are getting in return for their education investments—drilling down into the program level.”