Federal data, not estimates dressed up as facts.
Tech Pathways doesn't scrape job boards or buy pre-packaged "career data." Every number you see — wages, target occupations, apprenticeship pathways — comes from a federal API or research-grade public dataset, joined together with explicit provenance and confidence tiers.
- Programs covered
- 14,360
- Wage-mapped
- 97.7%
- Job-mapped
- 97.7%
- Apprenticeship-mapped
- 97.3%
By the numbers
Built 2026-05-11How a single program becomes a career.
Every program record carries a 4-digit CIP code from Scorecard. From there, the engine joins outward through three federal crosswalks until you have wages, target jobs, and apprenticeship paths on the same row.
- 1Program → CIPvia College Scorecard
Every U.S. CTE program reports a Classification of Instructional Programs code. Scorecard publishes them at the 4-digit level.
- 2CIP → 6-digit CIP → SOCvia O*NET education crosswalk
O*NET's education crosswalk fans the 4-digit code out to 6-digit specializations, then maps each to one or more Standard Occupational Classification codes.
- 3SOC → wagesvia BLS OEWS
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes employment + percentile wages for every SOC × geography. We pull national + state and surface the local one when you're looking at a school in that state. (Currently MN; other states one config flag away.)
- 4SOC → apprenticeshipsvia RAPIDS via O*NET
RAPIDS is the federal registry of registered apprenticeship occupations. O*NET's RAPIDS crosswalk links every SOC to its apprenticeship code(s) — the alternative path to the same wage.
The sources.
No paid data feeds. No scraped job boards. Eight sources, every one of them either federal, research-grade, or transparently labeled as generated.
- College ScorecardTier A
Institutions, programs, completers, debt, geocoding (UNITID anchor for the whole dataset).
Free API key - O*NET Web Services v2Tier A
CIP ↔ SOC crosswalks, occupation descriptions, sample reported job titles, Bright Outlook tags.
Free API key - BLS OEWSTier A
Employment + median, mean, p25, p75 annual wages by SOC × area. Latest release May 2024.
Free API key - RAPIDS (Office of Apprenticeship)Tier A
Registered apprenticeship occupation codes — every viable apprenticeship pathway for a given trade.
Public table via O*NET - NCATECH UAS-CTITier A
117 corroborated UAS-CTI participating schools + 26 named industry partners.
WP REST - America's Cutting Edge (ACE)Tier A
38 advanced-manufacturing bootcamps (CNC, metrology, composites) with venue + schedule.
WP REST - OpenStreetMap (Nominatim)Tier B
Geocoded employer headquarters; ~58% specific POI hits, ~42% city-centroid fallback.
Free, attribution - DeepSeek v4-flashTier Generated
Plain-language program names + descriptions + interest-category tags. Total cost: $0.02 across 14,360 programs.
API key
What we won't claim.
No fabricated employer-program edges.
“Companies that hire from program X” is mostly unobtainable as structured data without a paid feed (Lightcast, $30-100K/yr) or a state PIRL data-sharing agreement. We don't make it up. Where we surface employers, it's because they're documented industry partners, registered apprenticeship sponsors, or federally-tracked entities.
Every record carries a confidence tier.
Tier A = federal API or research dataset. Tier B = scraped under explicit structured headers. Tier C = LLM-extracted from narrative. Tier D = inferred via crosswalk only. Tiers never silently merge in a query.
Wages are an occupation median, not a graduation outcome.
Median wage shown on a program is the BLS-published median for the target occupation — what a working professional in that field earns today. It's not a placement guarantee. Where Scorecard publishes graduate earnings (~21% of programs), that's a separate signal.
Geocoding is honest about its limits.
OSM Nominatim is great for small towns and city centers, sparse for industrial corporate parks. Where we couldn't pin a specific HQ, the marker falls back to city-centroid and the underlying record is flagged.
Ready to look at it?
Open the map, pick a school, click a program. You'll see target jobs, median wage, and apprenticeship pathways surfaced together — that's the engine in three clicks.