by our College Data Analytics TeamThe world is full of subjective opinions that are passed off as fact and sources of information that are often biased or obtained via suspect methodologies. We believe in being fully transparent with every fact we present and focusing on the presenting facts and letting you form your own opinions based on them.
In This Article:
We leverage many different data sources but the core of our data comes from the following official United States government sources.
The core of our college data comes from the The Institute of Education Sciences (IES). This branch of the United States Department of Education (DOE) is the nation’s premier source for research, evaluation and statistics that helps educators, policymakers and stakeholders improve outcomes for all students. The college data comes specifically from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the IES.
Our list of majors are based on the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) from the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES) branch of the United States Department of Education (DOE). The CIP is a taxonomy of instructional programs that provides a classification system for the thousands of different programs offered by postsecondary institutions. Its purpose is to facilitate the organization, collection, and reporting of fields of study and program completions.
We use the Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) system that is the federal statistical standard used by federal agencies to classify workers into occupational categories for the purpose of collecting, calculating, or disseminating data. This allows us to report on the wealth of data occupation and employment data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Department of Labor (DOL).
The data sources we use and what we use them for are documented below.
The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes the following datasets that we use.
Wage Data by Area and Occupation
We use this national wage data for job projections by state, metropolitan area and the nationwide for over 800 different occupations. This data is compiled by the BLS using data from the National Compensation Survey, Occupation Employment Statistics Survey and the Current Population Survey.
Occupation Employment Statistics (OES)
OES data includes U.S. employment data going back as far as 1988. We leverage the data published from their Employment and Wages from Occupational Employment Statistics Survey for some of the following facts:
The United States Department of Education (DOE) publishes the following datasets that we use.
Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)
As noted in the overview above, this data comes from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) which is a part of the DOE and forms the backbone of our data about colleges and universities. IPEDs publishes over 50 different data sets across the following categories:
We use data from all of these categories on the site. Our practice is to take advantage of the provisional release data as soon as we are able to and then update with the final release data when available. Our fall rankings publication always uses the latest data available at that time.
College Scorecard
The DOE publishes its College Scorecard data collection. This massive dataset aggregates thousands of facts about education institutions and their specific programs from multiple sources into an easy to use reference. In general, when we have access to the original source of the data (which are always other US government agencies) we use that instead. However, there are some unique facts included in this scorecard that aren’t otherwise available such as graduate earnings data from the U.S. Department of Treasury and loan debt and repayment data from the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS). The Data by Field of Study is also where we get our pay data for graduates of specific majors at schools.
Database of Accredited Postsecondary Institutions and Programs (DAPIP)
We use DAPIP from the DOE’s Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE) for information about a school’s accreditation.
The United States Department of Labor (DOL) publishes the following datasets that we use.
O*NET Database
The Employment & Training Administration (ETA) of the DOL publishes the O*NET Database. The O*NET database contains a rich set of variables that describe work and worker characteristics, including skill requirements. The database includes over 30 datasets with the following types of occupation information:
We use data from most of these categories to power our careers data.
Student and Exchange Visitor Program
We initially obtained data from detailed H1-B visa data by school and country via our own Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to ICE. We have continued to request and receive this information each year.
This section will explain how we use the available data to derive additional insights.
The list of colleges, degrees, majors and careers included in any of our calculations is limited to those relevant to the website.
By connecting various datasets we can often come up with some new insights derived from such combinations of data. Some of these include:
| Entity | Calculation | Methodology |
|---|---|---|
| College | Racial-Ethnic Minorities | Calculated by taking the total number of students (per IPEDS) and subtracting white students, international students, and students whose race/ethnicity was unknown. This number is then divided by the total number of students at the school to obtain the racial-ethnic minorities percentage. While excluding international students is not ideal, IPEDS unfortunately does not provide race/ethnicity data on international students. |
| Major | Salary | We calculate an average earnings of the BLS occupations that are related to a given major, weighted by that occupation’s popularity (number of people in that occupation per BLS). The same method is applied for the percentile and geographic breakdowns. |
| Major | Required Education level / Work Experience | We calculate an average of the required education level / work experience across each of the occupations related to a major per the O*NET database, weighted by the popularity of that occupation (as determined by the people in that occupation per BLS data). |
We partner with schools to connect them to students that may be interested in their programs. Any list of “featured” schools that may be sponsored is labeled as such and does not affect our unbiased rankings in any way. Every ranking we present is 100% data-driven and is in no way influenced by, or limited to, schools that partner with us.
The following table breaks down some of the rankings we present and how they are calculated.
| Entity | Ranking | Methodology |
|---|---|---|
| College | Best Colleges | see full methodology |
| College | Best Graduate Schools | see full methodology |
| College | Best Value | see full methodology |
| College | Best for Diversity | see full methodology |
| College | Best for Student Athletes | see full methodology |
| College | Best for Veterans | see full methodology |
| College | Best for Returning Adults | see full methodology |
| College | Best for International Students | see full methodology |
| College | Best by Major | see full methodology |
| College | Best by Religious Affiliation | see full methodology |
We partner with schools to connect them to students that may be interested in their programs. Any list of “featured” schools that may be sponsored is labeled as such and does not affect our unbiased rankings in any way. Every ranking we present is 100% data-driven and is in no way influenced by, or limited to, schools that partner with us.
If you represent a school and are interested in being featured on the site, please contact us by emailing info@www.collegefactual.com.
We try to incorporate new releases of data as quickly as possible. Due to the time needed to compile such comprehensive data it is worth noting that many sources have a natural lag of a year or two.
| Source | Dataset | Version |
|---|---|---|
| BLS | Wage Data by Area and Occupation | 2016-2026 projections |
| DOE | College Scorecard | 11/20/2019 |
| DOE > IES > NCES | Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) | 2018 |
| DOE > OPE | Database of Accredited Postsecondary Institutions and Programs (DAPIP) | 07/18/2019 |
| DOL | O*NET Databse | 24.0 |
| ICE > SEVIS | H1-B Visa Data | 2019 |
We strive to ensure we are providing readers with accurate data. If you think there is an opportunity to improve that then we welcome any feedback on how we can be doing this better by emailing info@www.collegefactual.com.
We stick to the official data reported by each school to the Department of Education. We do not manually modify this official data as we lack the means to enforce and verify such information in the way the Department of Education does. Furthermore, changing one school would compromise the data so as to make comparisons between schools inaccurate and/or unfair.
If you represent a school and think we are incorrectly reporting the data that you reported to IPEDS, please let us know by contacting info@www.collegefactual.com.
