Methodology

Prentus scans public professional profiles of a school's graduates. For each graduate found, the scan records the school, the program where the profile lists one, the class year and the month when the profile lists one, the current job title, the employer, the employer's industry, and the location. It then records whether an outcome was found at all.

Those records are rolled up into counts and shares before they reach this site. What this site stores is a table of institution, employer, count and share, and nothing else. There is no row for a graduate anywhere in this database, no name, no profile address, and no free-text field. Individual records stay in a separate internal system this site cannot read.

This is the part of the site that did not exist before. Federal files publish what graduates earn. They do not publish which employers hire them or what job titles they hold.

What "graduates found employed" means

It is the share of a school's graduates that a scan found on a public professional profile and that show a current job. It is calculated the same way at every school, from the same public source.

It is not an official placement rate. An official rate follows an accreditor's or a state's definition of employment, counts every graduate rather than only the ones a profile was found for, usually includes graduates who never created a profile, and is reported by the school itself. The two numbers answer different questions and will not match.

Coverage

Coverage is the share of a school's completions for a class year that a public profile was found for. A school with 10,000 completions and 3,000 profiles found has 30% coverage. Everything derived from the found profiles carries that coverage with it: a top employer is the top employer among the graduates found, not among every graduate.

Coverage varies by school and by program. Fields where a public profile is part of the job search run higher. Fields where it is not run lower. Comparing two schools with very different coverage figures compares two different slices of their graduates, so both numbers appear next to each other on every page.

Class years and terms

A class year is the year a graduate completed. Where enough profiles list a graduation month, the year splits into spring and fall so a school can see its two conferral cycles separately. Where months are not listed, only the full year is shown.

Small-cell suppression

Any count under 10 from a Prentus scan is displayed as "fewer than 10" rather than an exact number, and the share beside it is hidden rather than shown next to a placeholder. A small cell can identify an individual graduate. This suppression applies only to scan-derived cells, which describe people Prentus found. Federal figures (IPEDS completions, College Scorecard, Census PSEO) are shown exactly as the federal government publishes them, including small counts, because they are the government's own published statistics rather than a Prentus-identified individual.

Two separate sources supply every dollar figure on this site, and they are never blended into one number.

College Scorecard supplies what a specific school's graduates report earning: median earnings one, four and ten years after completion, institution-wide and by program. These are the only graduate-earnings figures this site publishes for a school.

Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) supplies published pay for an occupation: national, state and metro percentiles by job title (a federal SOC code), independent of any school. A career page and a school's job-title table both show this figure labelled as pay for the job, never as what a school's graduates earn.

In testing, modeled salaries for a school's graduates ran higher than the federal figures, so Prentus does not publish them. Graduate salary appears only where a school has verified, reported salary data.