Methodology & Data Sources

Name: Trade school outcomes and registered apprenticeship sponsors, by U.S. state
Creator: Ikan Media Inc.
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Every number on this site comes from official federal datasets. Nothing is estimated, modeled, or pay-to-play. This page explains exactly where the data comes from and how the comparisons are computed.

Sources

Data	Source	Refresh
School costs, completion, debt, earnings, programs	U.S. Dept of Education College Scorecard (most recent release, pulled July 2026) — 3,106 schools	Annually, when ED publishes
Registered apprenticeship source records	U.S. Dept of Labor, apprenticeship.gov — 26,254 records in supported U.S. states	Quarterly
State licensing rules	Each state's official licensing board (cited on every page where shown)	Re-verified ~every 6 months

Definitions

Apprenticeship count scope: the homepage inventory count is the number of stored apprenticeship source records in supported U.S. states, before selecting the school-comparison rows used by the ROI report. It is not a count of distinct employers or confirmed job openings. The ROI report includes only state × trade combinations with a published school-comparison page. Its total adds matched records across those rows; one source record may map to more than one trade. That sum is not deduplicated across rows and is not comparable to the full source-record inventory. Registration alone does not establish that a sponsor is accepting applications. Check the sponsor's official application route.

Average net price: yearly cost after grants and scholarship aid, as reported to ED — not the sticker price.
Completion rate: ED's consumer completion rate — share of students who finish.
Median debt: median federal loan debt of students who completed.
Median earnings: median earnings of federally-aided students 10 years after entry; program-level figures are 2 years after completing that program.

How the ranking works

School lists are ranked by a single transparent ratio: median earnings 10 years after entry, per $1,000 of average yearly net price. Higher = more earnings per tuition dollar. We deliberately do NOT use a black-box composite score. Schools missing either figure sort last but are never hidden.

Percentile comparisons ("cheaper than X% of comparable schools") compare a school against all U.S. schools offering programs in the same federal program category (CIP-4), computed at build time from the same dataset.

What "not reported" means

Federal datasets suppress values for small cohorts (privacy) and where schools have no federally-aided students in scope. A "not reported" is honesty, not an error — and never treated as zero.

What we don't do

No school pays to be listed, ranked higher, or described favorably. If sponsored placements ever exist, they will be labeled as such.
We never write or alter the numbers. AI is used to draft plain-English summaries from the official figures, and every draft passes an automated fact-check that rejects any dollar or percentage not present in the source data.
We are not affiliated with any government agency, school, or licensing board.

Who runs this

Explore Top Colleges is operated by Ikan Media Inc., a U.S. digital publisher. Questions or corrections: see contact. If you spot an error, we want to know — corrections ship in days, not months.