What is graduate supply?
Graduate supply is the estimated number of recent graduates from nearby institutions of higher education that meet your search criteria. Within each institution, we provide data on the top programs for this talent as well as the gender and ethnic breakdown of this talent. Institutions include private, public, for-profit, and online-only schools.
Currently, we provide graduate supply data for the United States only.
What can I use this data for?
You can use graduate supply data to identify schools that might be good sources of your target talent, as well as schools that house diverse talent.
Acquire: Where do you get your graduate supply data?
Graduate supply data comes from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), a group of interrelated surveys conducted by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), part of the United States Department of Education. Any institution that receives or applies for federal financial assistance must complete all IPEDS surveys.
Organize: How do you prepare the data for analysis?
IPEDS data includes information on the institution’s name and location, the number of degrees awarded by degree type and program, and the gender and ethnic breakdown of the graduates. IPEDS uses the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP), a taxonomy for fields of study. We translate these CIP codes to occupational codes using a mapping maintained by the NCES. Learn more about occupations.
Analyze: How do you calculate graduate supply?
We estimate graduate supply using data from IPEDS. With this government data as an anchor, we estimate gender diversity for more granular attributes (like skills and credentials) using patterns found in job postings from the past few years.
We determine the location of each school using the location they report to the NCES. For online-only programs, this is generally the location of their corporate headquarters.
Deliver: How do you represent graduate supply data?
We represent graduate supply as a total number of graduates per institution, as well as a breakdown of these graduates by degree type, field of study (i.e. program), gender, and ethnicity.
More about graduate supply:
When was your graduate supply data last updated?
We last updated our graduate supply data in 2021. This is based on 2020 IPEDS Survey.
What ethnicities are included in "Other"?
“Other” comprises the following ethnicities:
American Indian and Alaska Native alone
Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander alone
Two or more races
Race/ethnicity unknown
Nonresident alien
What location types do you have graduate supply data for?
We calculate graduate supply data at the country, state, metropolitan statistical area (MSA), county, and city level.
What search filters impact graduate supply?
We are able to provide graduate supply data for some (but not all) of the job attributes in our search experience: function, occupation, title, skills, credentials, and keywords. In other words, adding these filters to your search will change the graduate supply.
Education level and employment type will affect graduate supply if your search does not include an occupation.
Graduate supply is not impacted by experience level.
How do you define each of your degree types?
The NCES provides 11 options for “award level,” which we group into 4 degree types.