The U.S. Department of Education has been promising program-level earnings data in the College Scorecard for several months now following the release of program-level debt data back in May. Debt data are interesting, but I think everyone was waiting for earnings data to come out. And it came out today, sending me scrambling to get into the data in between meetings, teaching, and other responsibilities of a tenured faculty member. The data can be found here, and please do read the documentation before digging into the data.
Before I get back to meetings, here are a few takeaways:
(1) Debt and earnings data are based on different samples of students. Debt data only include people with federal loans, while earnings data include people with any type of financial aid. At community colleges, these samples are quite different because more students typically get Pell Grants than loans. But for graduate programs, the numbers really only differ by a few work-study students.
(2) Most programs aren’t covered in the data, but most students are. For the most recent data file, there are 216,638 programs listed. Of these programs, 45,371 have earnings data and 51,423 have debt data.
(3) Earnings data are soon after graduation. Earnings were measured in 2016-17 for students graduating in 2014-15 and 2015-16. More years of data will be included in the future.
(4) Want to make money? Be a dentist. The program with highest earnings was (The) Ohio State University’s dental program, with earnings of $231,200 and debt of $173,309. Dental and other health sciences programs dominated the top of the earnings distributions, with a few law and business programs thrown in. Most of these programs have high debt burdens. On the other hand, Parker University’s chiropractic program brought up the rear with debt of $193,328 and earnings of $2,700. Something strange is probably going on with the data there.
(5) Earnings and debt vary considerably by credential level. In general, both debt and earnings increase across credential levels, but debt increases at a higher rate. As shown below, the median debt-to-earnings ratio across first professional (law, medicine, etc.) programs was 191%. Earnings often increase quickly in future years, but the first few years won’t be fun.
I look forward to seeing a whole host of (responsible) analyses using the new data, so keep me posted of any good takes. This has the potential to influence families and colleges alike, and I’m particularly interested to see if the data release affects whether colleges close low-performing programs (as I discussed in my last blog post).
Robert Kelchen 
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