Every number in Degree Pathways comes from a public, authoritative source — graduate and earnings data from the U.S. Department of Education, and career links from the U.S. Department of Labor. This page explains exactly what each source is, how reliable it is, how we combine them, where the limits are, and who to credit. We would rather show you an honest gap than a made-up number.
Each occupation in the O*NET database carries the fields of study (CIP codes) that lead into it. We invert that official crosswalk so that, for any major a school offers, we can list the real occupations it can open. Occupation links go to the Department of Labor's public O*NET OnLine profile for that job (duties, skills, typical pay, outlook).
The list of majors and the number of students who graduate in each comes from IPEDS (the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System). Reporting is legally mandatory for every institution that accepts federal financial aid, under Title IV of the Higher Education Act — so it is effectively a census of U.S. higher education, not a survey. We download the completions file directly from NCES (the Department of Education's statistics center) and always use the newest year released, including provisional releases, so degree counts are as current as the federal pipeline allows. A major that awarded no degrees in the newest year stays listed only if it has a real earnings track record, and the zero is shown honestly.
Schools report each academic year's degrees the following fall, and NCES publishes the collection about a year after that — so the newest possible counts are always roughly two years behind today. That lag is a property of the federal reporting cycle, not of this app; a school's mix of majors changes slowly, so the map stays accurate. New releases flow in as NCES publishes them.
Earnings and debt come from the College Scorecard's field-of-study data. The earnings figures are built from actual IRS tax records of graduates — not self-reported by schools — so no institution can inflate them. Debt is the median federal student loan debt of that major's graduates.
These are not the same students followed over time. Each figure is a different graduating class, measured in a different year: the "4 years out" number is one cohort, the "5 years out" number is an older, separate cohort, each with its own sample size. That is why one can legitimately sit above another — they are three independent snapshots, not a rising or falling line for one group of people.
To report what a program's graduates earn, the government must wait for them to be several years into the workforce, match them to IRS records, then pool multiple graduating classes so small programs can't be re-identified. So school×major earnings are always measured on cohorts from several years back — no fresher public source of school-specific, major-specific earnings exists. Levels age — which is why we also show, clearly dated and clearly separate, what each field pays today (next section).
Our rule: we publish no numbers of our own. Every dollar figure in Degree Pathways is a published federal number, shown with its date. We do not adjust, project, extrapolate, or combine figures to create new ones — an automated gate checks every screen against the source files before anything ships, and it rejects any dollar figure that isn't a published number (or that same number rounded for display).
The school's record (College Scorecard, from IRS tax records): what graduates of that specific program earned, measured 1, 4, and 5 years after finishing. The current release (updated March 23, 2026) draws on the graduating classes of 2015–2020 — the newest school-specific earnings the federal government publishes, because it must wait for careers to begin and then match tax records. What the field pays today (Census Bureau, American Community Survey): the current national median for early-career graduates (ages 25–34 with a bachelor's) in that field of degree — a real, measured, current-year figure.
Each figure is labeled with what it measures and when. Seeing them side by side — "grads of this program earned about $X, measured four years after the classes of 2015–2020 graduated; that field nationally pays about $Y today" — lets a reader take in both the program's record and today's market at a glance, without us manufacturing a bridge between them. Any conclusion about what that means for a student's own future is theirs to draw, ideally with an advisor.
Headline figures are shown rounded to the nearest thousand and marked with "≈" — a $98,045 published median displays as "≈ $98,000" — because medians describe whole groups, and to-the-dollar precision would imply more than any median can promise. The exact published figure always appears alongside (and in every tooltip), and our integrity gate verifies that every rounded figure matches its published source.
One matching note: the Census classifies degrees into about 170 fields, a little broader than the categories schools report under. When a specific major falls inside a wider Census field, we display that Census field's own name next to the benchmark, so it is always clear exactly what the number describes.
The chain is: the fields of study your school awards degrees in (IPEDS) → real outcomes for each field (College Scorecard earnings + debt) → what the field pays today (Census ACS benchmark, shown separately and never blended) → the careers each field can open (O*NET crosswalk). Everything is pre-computed into static files and served without any live external call, so results are fast, private, and reproducible.
No tool predicts your future. Earnings reflect past graduates and lag a few years; your own pay will vary with role, location, economy, and choices far beyond your major. Suppressed earnings leave real gaps we fill with national figures or an honest blank. Conference/system labels are for navigation and can shift with athletic realignment. Degree Pathways is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any school; we use school names and colors only for identification.
The O*NET database is provided by the National Center for O*NET Development under sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, and is used under the Creative Commons / DOL Career Exploration Tools License. O*NET® is a trademark of the U.S. Department of Labor. See onetcenter.org and the Career Exploration Tools license.
IPEDS and College Scorecard are works of the U.S. Department of Education and are in the public domain. See nces.ed.gov/ipeds and collegescorecard.ed.gov/data.
American Community Survey public use microdata is a work of the U.S. Census Bureau and is in the public domain. See census.gov ACS PUMS. This product uses Census Bureau data but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.
Each dataset carries the version and date we pulled it. IPEDS refreshes annually (provisional each fall), College Scorecard periodically, and the ACS yearly; we watch the release pages and re-ingest when new data drops, always shipping the newest published year. Before anything goes live, an automated integrity gate re-renders the app against the source files, verifies every dollar figure on screen is a published federal number (or that number rounded for display), and confirms every comparison recomputes from its published sources. If a source can't be verified, the affected numbers don't publish.