Methodology

Three federal sources, all public and free to download. No school supplies us with data.

• College Scorecard, Field of Study. Median earnings four years after completion and median federal loan debt at completion, by program. Published by the US Department of Education from tax and federal aid records.
• IPEDS. Published tuition and fees, awards conferred, and the institution directory. Collected by the National Center for Education Statistics.
• BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. Wages and employment by occupation. We link to these rather than reproduce them — see below.

We download the raw datasets, filter them to the CIP codes that make up each of our six fields, normalise the result to one file per field, and generate the pages from those files at build time. Nothing is fetched while you read, and nothing is hand-typed.

The CIP mapping is a configuration file in our codebase, not something buried in the processing code, so the definition of each field can be inspected and changed independently of the pipeline. The pipeline is re-runnable and produces the same output from the same inputs.

Current data generated 2026-09-03 from Most-Recent-Cohorts-Field-of-Study_06102026.zip and IPEDS C2023_A, C2023DEP, IC2023_AY, HD2023.

These are not caveats we are obliged to print. They are the reasons a figure on this site might mislead you, and you should read them before acting on anything here.

Debt covers federal loans only. Private loans, credit cards, parent borrowing and family money are invisible in this dataset. Real cost is routinely higher than the debt figures we publish — sometimes far higher at expensive private institutions.

Earnings count only people who finished. The Scorecard measures completers who were working and not enrolled four years later. Students who dropped out — who often carry debt and no credential, the worst outcome available — are not in the earnings figure at all. Every median on this site is therefore more optimistic than the true experience of everyone who enrolled.

Programs are pooled at a four-digit CIP level. The Scorecard reports field-of-study data at four digits, not six. A figure shown for one program may combine several related programs at the same institution. Where we say “Music”, the federal source means everything in CIP 50.09.

Small programs are missing. Where too few students completed a program for the government to report safely, the figure is suppressed for privacy. Across our six fields, earnings are suppressed for about 4% of programs and debt for about 22%. Those programs are not in our medians, and small programs are systematically under-represented as a result.

There is no program-level completion rate. IPEDS publishes graduation rates for institutions, not for individual programs. We do not show a completion rate per program because the federal data does not contain one, and an institution-wide rate would misrepresent it.

Closed institutions are excluded. The Scorecard still reports outcomes for schools that have since shut down — the Art Institutes, Argosy University and similar chains. Those figures are real, but nobody can enrol, and the institutions no longer appear in the federal directory at all, so they carry no location or ownership detail. We drop them: about 800 program records across our six fields. It means our medians describe programs a student could actually choose today, and it also means our figures will differ slightly from any analysis that keeps them in.

The data lags. Earnings four years after completion necessarily describe people who finished several years ago. Tuition is the most recently published year. Neither reflects what a program charges or produces today.

Medians hide the spread. Half of graduates earn less than the median. In creative fields especially, income is uneven, seasonal and often freelance, so a single number describes very few actual people.

Occupational wage figures describe everyone working in a role, regardless of how they got there — including people with decades of experience and people who never studied the field. Printing an occupational median beside a program cost implies a connection the data does not support. We link to the relevant BLS pages from each field so you can read them in their own context.

• We do not estimate, model or project figures. If the federal source suppresses a number, we show a dash.
• We do not adjust figures to make a program look better or worse.
• We do not accept payment to change, remove or soften any figure. See our advertiser disclosure.
• We make no claims of our own about employment, earnings, admission or aid outcomes.

If a figure here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did. Email hello@studycreative.org with the page and the figure.