About Program Payoff

Program Payoff publishes what a certificate or associate program costs, what its graduates have earned, and what the work it leads to pays — for every such program at every US college that reports one. It exists because those three numbers are published by three different agencies in three different files, and nobody puts them on the same page.

Where the data comes from

Programs, debt and graduate earnings: the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard field-of-study file, which reports by institution, field and credential level. Occupation wages: the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, at state level. The link between them: the National Center for Education Statistics CIP-to-SOC crosswalk, which maps a field of study to the occupations it leads to. All three are works of the US Government and in the public domain.

Why most programs show a dash

This is the single most important thing to understand about these pages. The Department of Education withholds any figure computed from too few graduates, to avoid identifying individuals. Across sub-baccalaureate programs that covers about four in every five: only around a fifth carry a published median earning. A dash means the Department published nothing. It is not a zero, and it is not a verdict on the program.

It is also why this site exists in the shape it does. We could have published only the fifth of programs with figures, and had a small site of confident pages. Instead every page is built from what is never withheld — that a school teaches a program, and what occupation it leads to — so it can always answer “what does this work pay” from BLS, and adds the graduates' own figures where the Department has released them. The two are always labelled as the different things they are.

What we deliberately do not do

We do not rank schools, score them, or tell you which to choose. We do not predict what you will earn. We do not pass your details to admissions offices or lead brokers, and no school can pay to appear, to rank higher, or to have a number removed.

Who runs it

Program Payoff is an independent publication operated by Ospan (Nevada, USA). It is not affiliated with the Department of Education, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, NCES, or any school listed. Trucking pay and FMCSA-registered CDL training locations are on our companion site HaulBench.

Corrections

If a page disagrees with College Scorecard or BLS, that is a bug and we want to know: tell us with the school, the program, and what you expected. Errors in the federal data itself have to be raised with the agency that published it.