DegreeMapper indexes every U.S. postsecondary institution that the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard classifies with school.degrees_awarded.predominant = 2 — the federal designation for a college whose most-awarded credential is the associate degree. This is the operational definition of "community college" used throughout the site. The dataset includes public, private nonprofit, and private for-profit institutions, and we surface ownership clearly on every profile.
For each institution we ingest a fixed schema of identifying fields, financial-aid figures, enrollment and demographic counts, completion and retention rates, transfer outcomes, post-enrollment earnings, and the federally tracked share of credentials awarded by program area. All values are taken from the latest Scorecard release at build time. Where the federal data is missing or suppressed for an institution, we display an em-dash rather than a substituted estimate, and we never silently fall back to industry averages.
State hubs and program guides are derived from the underlying institution-level data using simple, transparent aggregations: medians for tuition; sums for enrollment; share-of-credentials ranking for program presence. We do not weight, smooth, or otherwise transform the federal numbers. Editorial copy on this site is written by humans and reviewed before publication; the underlying data is published as the federal government released it.
The site is statically rendered: every page you see is a real HTML document on disk, generated from the data and templates in this repository. There is no behind-the-scenes JavaScript that fetches a different number than the one printed on the page. If a figure on a college profile differs from College Scorecard's own site, the most likely explanation is that we and Scorecard are looking at different release dates of the same underlying record.
Data source
Primary source: U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard data dictionary. Supplementary references are linked in context throughout the site, principally the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Outlook Handbook for career-pathway pages and the National Center for Education Statistics' IPEDS for institutional context.