How We Connect Careers to Education Programs
Career pages show related education programs and schools; school and program pages show related careers. That link comes from an official federal crosswalk, not a guess.
The CIP-SOC crosswalk
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) maintains an official crosswalk between CIP codes (fields of study) and SOC codes (occupations) — for example, mapping "Electrical and Power Transmission Installation" to "Electricians." We use this crosswalk exactly as published, without adding our own guessed connections.
Why 4-digit CIP, not 6-digit
NCES publishes the crosswalk at the detailed 6-digit CIP level, but the only source with real school-level program data (College Scorecard’s Field of Study file) reports fields of study at the coarser 4-digit level, for student-privacy reasons (small graduating classes aren’t broken out further). Rather than show a false 6-digit precision we can’t actually back with real program data, we work at the 4-digit level throughout — an honest simplification, not a shortcut.
How schools are ranked on a program page
Schools shown for a given program are ordered by number of completions (graduates) in the most recent College Scorecard cohort — a proxy for how established the program is, not a quality ranking or a paid placement.
Earnings and debt figures
Program earnings and debt come from College Scorecard’s own reported cohort outcomes. When a value is suppressed for privacy (too few graduates) or simply missing, we show “Not available” — never a $0, which would misleadingly suggest a free program or no earnings.