Describing program award levels
Education levels that people attain are described differently across data sets, and even across years within some data sources. Therefore, presenting the education levels in a consistent manner across time and across data sets led to a few compromises which we detail following.
Professional and Doctoral Degrees
IPEDS
Within IPEDS (higher education) data there was a change in reporting after the 2010-2011 academic year. For the 2010-2011 year and earlier, IPEDS reported:
- First-professional degrees requiring at least two years of college-level work and at least six years of higher education (this designation was intended to catch doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, etc.)
- Professional certificates describing further specialization by these individuals; and
- Doctoral degrees -- degrees like the PhD or EdD
After the 2010-2011 academic year, IPEDS changed their designations:
- Doctoral degree - research/scholarship: must include advanced work beyond the master's level and the preparation and defense of a dissertation containing original research (PhD, EdD, DSc, DM, etc.);
- Doctoral degree - professional practice: a graduate degree that takes at least six years in higher education and provides the knowledge and skills for the recognition, credential, or license required for professional practice; and
- Doctoral degree - other: a doctoral degree that does not meet the requirements of the previous two designations.
In the interest of being able to share trends over the years, Ididio treats all first-professional degrees and professional certificates as professional doctorates, and all pre-2010/11 doctoral degrees as research doctorates. We don't have a way to pull out degrees that might not have met either the research or professional standards in the pre-2010/11 designations, so our mappings can only give an idea of historic trends and may suggest some early programs contained more scholarship than was actually the case.
Census
In our programs and careers pages, we explore the education attained by workers and degree-holders using ACS household microdata from the Census Bureau. This survey records whether someone holds
- A professional degree beyond a bachelor's degree (e.g. MD, DDS, DVM, LLB, JD); or
- A doctorate degree (e.g. PhD, EdD).
Similar to our work to in marrying the older and newer IPEDS data, we map the professional degrees to the same bin as IPEDS professional doctorates, and then doctoral degrees to doctorates, which includes research and other doctoral degrees.
Certificates and Associate' Degrees
IPEDS
A goal of IPEDS reporting is the classify higher education offerings with precision, so there are many careful delineations between certificate lengths offered.
College Scorecard
We share data reporting median starting salaries and cumulative federal debt by program and program level. This data from College Scorecard groups all less-than-four-year degrees as either certificates or associate's degrees. Thus, we have no way to know the earnings consequences of 1-year versus 2-year degrees in various fields.
Census
When asked about educational attainment, current American Community Survey (ACS) participants who have earned a vocational or technical certificate are in a bit of a bind. They can report 1 or more year of college with no degree earned, or they can report earning an associate's degree, but there is no field to report having earned a postsecondary certificate. Therefore, we have chosen to interpret the associate's degree as an associate's degree or a certificate because we suspect respondents who have earned a certificate would not choose to say they have not earned a degree. We believe for vocational or technical fields, the difference between an associate's degree or a certificate could be minimal. However, it is likely that some who hold certificates will instead choose the first option, and will be counted as not having received an associate's or certificate.
