Every number in Degree Pathways comes from a public, authoritative federal source. This page explains exactly what each source is, what it measures, how reliable it is, how we put them together, where the limits are, and who to credit. Our standing rule: we would rather show you an honest gap than a made-up number.
Last updated: August 16, 2026. Source releases and their dates are listed in section 8.
We publish no figures of our own. Every dollar amount in the app is a published federal number shown with its date, or that same number rounded to the nearest thousand so it is quick to read. We do not adjust for inflation, project, extrapolate, index, or average two sources together to create a third. An automated integrity gate re-renders the app against the source files before anything ships and rejects any figure it cannot trace back to a published number.
Each occupation in the O*NET database carries the fields of study (CIP codes) connected with it. We invert that official crosswalk so that, for any field of study a school reports, we can list the occupations the federal crosswalk connects to it. Occupation links go to the Department of Labor's public O*NET OnLine profile for that job, with duties, skills, typical pay, and outlook.
This is a map of the occupations commonly associated with a field, not a limit on where its graduates go, and not a claim that studying the field causes any particular career. Plenty of people end up in occupations the crosswalk never connects to their field, and the app says so wherever the list appears.
The list of fields of study 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, which makes it effectively a census of U.S. higher education rather than 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.
Counts are first majors only, so a double major's second field is not counted twice. Totals published elsewhere that include second majors, or that use a newer reporting year, will read higher. A major that awarded no degrees in the newest year stays listed only when it has a real earnings track record, and the zero is shown honestly rather than hidden.
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 belongs to the federal reporting cycle, not to this app. A school's mix of majors changes slowly, so the map stays accurate, and 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 graduates represented in that field at that school, measured at graduation.
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 independent snapshots, not a rising or falling line for one group of people.
To report what a school's graduates in a field earn, the government must wait for them to get several years into the workforce, match them to IRS records, then pool multiple graduating classes so that small groups cannot be re-identified. School-by-field earnings are therefore always measured on cohorts from several years back, and no fresher public source of school-specific, field-specific earnings exists. Dollar levels age, which is why we also show, clearly dated and clearly separate, what each field pays today (section 4).
The green bar in the app is a different measurement of a different group of people, and it is labeled that way on screen. It is the current national median for early-career graduates, ages 25 to 34, holding a bachelor's degree in that field of degree, from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. It describes everyone working in the field nationwide right now, not this school's graduates.
The school's record (College Scorecard, from IRS tax records): published median earnings for graduates represented in that field at that school, measured 1, 4, and 5 years after finishing, for the graduating classes named on screen. What the field pays today (Census ACS): a current-year national median for ages 25 to 34. Each figure is labeled with what it measures and when. Seeing them together lets a reader take in both the school's published record for the field and today's market at a glance, without us manufacturing a bridge between them. Any conclusion about what that means for one student's future is theirs to draw, ideally with an advisor.
The Census classifies degrees into about 170 fields, a little broader than the categories schools report under. When a specific field 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. National categories, federal field-of-study codes and the names universities give their own majors do not always line up one to one, which is a real limit on any comparison of this kind and a good reason to treat the app as the start of an exploration rather than the last word.
Headline figures are shown rounded to the nearest thousand: a published median of $98,045 displays as $98,000. 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 the integrity gate verifies that each rounded figure matches its published source.
An asterisk on a figure means one thing only: it is a benchmark rather than this school's own record, shown because the school-specific figure is withheld for privacy or was never published. Every asterisked figure carries a label saying which benchmark it is.
The app shows this next to every field, because a gap between two published medians is easy to misread as a grade on a field or a school. It is almost never that. Differences of this kind are driven by ordinary, well-understood things:
We deliberately make no claim about how much any one factor contributes, because no published figure supports that. The app names the causes and leaves the weighing to the reader.
The chain is: the fields of study your school awards degrees in (IPEDS) sits beside published earnings and debt for each field (College Scorecard), what the field pays today (Census ACS benchmark, separate and never blended) and the careers connected with each field (O*NET crosswalk).
All of it is pre-computed into static files by an offline pipeline and served without any live external call for the data itself, so results are fast, private, and reproducible. The app makes same-origin requests only for licensing and free-access checks, and no exploration content is ever sent to those endpoints. Our own work is the cross-referencing: matching four datasets to each other, school by school and field by field, so they read as one picture. We add no numbers of our own, and every figure links back to its source so you can check us.
No tool predicts your future. Earnings reflect past graduates and lag a few years; your own pay will vary with role, location, employer, economy, and choices far beyond your field of study. Suppressed earnings leave real gaps that we fill with a labeled national figure or an honest blank. Federal sources revise their own files over time, so a figure can change when a source is corrected. Federal fields of study are not the same thing as the majors, concentrations and degree programs named in a university catalog: one federal field can cover several catalog programs, and the names often differ. Program names, prerequisites, capacity, and availability come from each school and may have changed since the reporting year, so the catalog is always the authority on what you can actually enroll in, and an advisor is the authority on what makes sense for you. Conference and system labels exist for navigation and can shift with athletic realignment. Degree Pathways is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or certified by any school or government agency, and school names and colors are used only for identification.
Every screen also shows the vintage of the specific figure it displays. This table is the summary.
| What you see | Source | Vintage |
|---|---|---|
| Fields of study and degree counts | IPEDS Completions (NCES) | Newest released academic year, provisional; shown on screen |
| Graduate earnings at 1, 4, 5 years, and median debt | College Scorecard, field of study | March 2026 release, graduating classes of 2015 to 2020 |
| What the field pays today, ages 25 to 34 | Census ACS 1-year PUMS | 2024 survey year |
| Careers each field opens | O*NET, CIP to SOC crosswalk | O*NET 30.x, continuously updated |
We watch each source's release page and re-ingest when new data drops, always shipping the newest published year. Before anything goes live, the 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 cannot be verified, the affected numbers do not publish.
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.
Use of any of these sources here does not imply endorsement by the agency that publishes them.
Tell us. If a figure here does not match its federal source, that is a bug and we want to fix it, ideally the same week. Email support@julieclarkson.com with the school, the field, and what you are seeing.