Methodology

How every number on Truewise is computed. Last updated 2026-10-03. Data vintages: College Scorecard release 2026-06-10; BLS OEWS May 2025 + Employment Projections 2025-35; CRDC 2023-24.

Sources

Everything comes from public U.S. federal data. College outcomes use two College Scorecard bulk files (most recent release, 2026-06-10), joined on the IPEDS UNITID: the Field-of-Study file (per program: median earnings after completion, median debt) and the Institution file (the state and national high-school-graduate earnings thresholds). Careers demand adds the NCES CIP-to-SOC crosswalk, BLS OEWS wages, and BLS Employment Projections. High-school data comes from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC).

The earnings-premium test (Value Check)

For each program (school × 4-digit CIP × credential) we take median earnings four years after completion, the same figure the Department of Education displays on the public College Scorecard site, falling back to the one-year figure only where the four-year value is suppressed, and compare it to the state high-school-graduate earnings threshold:

• Passes: median earnings are at or above the state threshold.
• Falls short: median earnings are below it.
• Not assessed: no comparison is made. Either ED did not publish the program's earnings (usually a small cohort), shown as "earnings not published", or there is no state benchmark to compare with, shown as "no state benchmark". Nothing is guessed.

The headline number, in full

Our headline is that 1 in 10 undergraduate programs with reported earnings have graduates who earn less than a typical high-school graduate. Here is exactly what is behind it, including the parts most coverage leaves out:

• Which programs. Undergraduate certificates, associate's and bachelor's degrees: the credentials the federal earnings-premium test compares with high-school graduates. Graduate programs are held to a bachelor's-holder line under the 2026 rule, so they are not in the headline; see the graduate finding.
• Each program counted once. ED reports field-of-study earnings for each federal institution ID (OPEID) and repeats the same figures on every campus that shares it. We count a program once per ID, field and credential. Where campuses in different states would get different verdicts (48 programs), the main campus's state decides, as the federal rule compares an institution with the state where it is located.
• Denominator. Of 149,340 undergraduate programs, 42,653 have reported earnings. Of those, 41,198 (about 28%) also have the state high-school-graduate benchmark needed for the comparison, and the rate is computed on that set: 4,308 fall short (10.5%, or 1 in 9.6). The other 1,455 report earnings but cannot be judged because that state benchmark is unavailable, mostly closed schools and territories absent from ED's current institution file; the remaining programs are mainly privacy-suppressed by ED for small cohorts.
• Horizon. Earnings are measured up to four years after completing. Where the four-year figure is suppressed we fall back to the one-year figure, and 31% of the programs that fall short use that fallback. On four-year earnings alone the rate is 7.8% (2,982 of 38,287), about 1 in 13. One-year rows carry a visible "1-yr" marker so you can weigh them.
• Cosmetology. Among undergraduate cosmetology programs (CIP 12.04), 96% fall short (885 of 923 with data).
• Correction, September 2026. This page previously said 1 in 11 (5,396 of 60,202). That count treated every campus row as a separate program, so programs shared across campuses were counted several times, and it included graduate programs judged against the high-school line. Counted once and across all credentials, the rate is 8.1% (4,438 of 54,701); undergraduate-only, as above, it is 10.5%. See Updates.

How sensitive is that number?

The fair criticism of any rate built on the reported 28% is that suppression might not be random, so the visible programs could be an unrepresentative sample. Suppression is indeed not random: undergraduate certificates are about 84% suppressed and fall short at 34.6% where reported, while bachelor's degrees are about 60% suppressed and fall short at 4.7%. Reported programs have a median of 35 graduates; suppressed ones have 4.

Assuming every suppressed program falls short at the rate observed in its own credential-and-sector group, and re-estimating across all programs, the rate becomes 12.1%, against the 10.5% we publish. So the reported programs likely understate the true share, because the programs ED suppresses are disproportionately certificates, which fall short most often. This adjustment only accounts for credential and sector mix; it cannot tell whether suppressed programs differ from reported ones within the same group, so read it as a sign that the true share is probably somewhat higher than 10.5%, not as a precise figure.

One distinction worth stating plainly, because it is easy to conflate. Our headline counts programs. Weighted by the number of graduates instead, the rate is 9.7%, a little lower: programs that fall short are somewhat smaller than average. Graduate counts are the ones ED's College Scorecard site displays. Both numbers are in site/data/value_check_summary.json and are recomputed by analysis/summary.py on every data refresh; a test checks that this page matches it.

Reproduce these numbers: the dataset lives in published/value_check.parquet and the exact script is analysis/summary.py in the GitHub repo.

Principles

• Never impute. Suppressed values (PS, NA) become null and are shown as "not published", never guessed. This rule is enforced by a data-quality gate (analysis/validate.py) with unit tests.
• Every figure carries its source and data vintage. Earnings reflect the recent past; we frame them as "graduates typically earned", never as a promise.
• A flag describes the data. It never tells anyone whether to attend a program.

Why do other studies say 1 in 4?

Some coverage (for example a widely cited HEA Group study) reports that attendees of about 1 in 4 higher-ed programs earn less than high-school graduates. The difference from our 1 in 10 is not a contradiction, it is three definitional choices:

• Who counts. Studies that count attendees (including non-completers) show higher failure rates than ones that count graduates, as we do here.
• The benchmark. A national high-school-earnings line, a state line, or an age-adjusted line each move the bar. We use ED's own state threshold.
• The denominator. Including or excluding privacy-suppressed programs changes the base. We are explicit that ours is the 28% of undergraduate programs with reported earnings.

All three are defensible; we state ours plainly so the number is reproducible.

Cite this

The other modules, in brief

Affordability shows net price by family-income bracket (College Scorecard NPT41 to NPT45), coalesced across a school's sector; suppressed brackets show as "not reported". Debt as years of gain divides a program's median federal debt by its yearly earnings premium over a high-school graduate. It is a ratio, not a repayment time: it ignores interest, taxes and living costs. Where a program has no premium, the page says so rather than showing a number. Compare also shows Pell share and completion beside the earnings-premium pass rate, with a transparent "hidden gem" rule (beats all three national medians); it is an access-and-outcomes view, not the Chetty income-mobility rate. Careers pools program earnings to the field level and joins BLS occupation pay and outlook through the NCES CIP-to-SOC crosswalk. High schools report, from the CRDC, which advanced courses a school offers, participation, and staffing (counselors, security).

Full detail for every module is in METHODOLOGY.md and the data dictionary.

Known limitations

• Earnings cohorts predate the current year; figures describe past graduates.
• The debt-to-earnings ratio shown is a plain ratio, not the amortized federal D/E rate.
• High-school data is the 2023-24 CRDC, released by ED in September 2026; the collection year is labeled on every high-school page. Two readings are ours, not ED's. First, ED published a high school's AP or IB answer of “No” as -9 (“not applicable”): the School Form asks every school with grade 9-12 students both questions as required Yes/No items (APIB-1 and APIB-3), no “No” appears anywhere in the file, and read as “No” the national rates match 2021-22 (AP 53.5% against 54.1%, IB 3.8% against 3.9%). So Truewise reads -9 as “No” at regular high schools, and as unknown at justice facilities and where a school reported AP courses under a -9 (about 850 schools for AP, 790 for IB). Second, ED withheld every count of nonbinary students under Executive Order 14168, so enrollment totals and participation rates count only students reported as male or female.
• The Careers occupation layer uses a many-to-many CIP-to-occupation crosswalk, so it lists the occupations a field commonly leads to rather than predicting any one graduate's job.