Methodology & editorial standards
Most degree rankings are advertising. Ours are arithmetic on federal data, and we earn nothing from what they conclude. This page explains exactly how the numbers are produced, what they cannot tell you, and how to challenge them.
Financial disclosure
- We hold no affiliate relationships with any school, degree marketplace, or lead-generation network.
- We accept no payment, sponsorship, or consideration of any kind from institutions we cover, and none from their agencies.
- No institution reviews our analysis before publication, and placement in any ranking cannot be purchased or influenced.
- We publish this research because it is adjacent to what we do — Mayfaire Row Partners is an investment firm, and this costs us nothing to compute once the data is in hand.
If that changes, this page changes first, and every affected article will carry a disclosure at the top.
Where the numbers come from
Every earnings figure we publish is computed from the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard field-of-study dataset. It is not a survey. It links program completion records to federal tax filings, which means it reports what graduates were actually paid rather than what they told a questionnaire.
We query the dataset directly through the api.data.gov gateway and compute our own aggregates. We do not republish another site's rankings, and we do not use self-reported salary data from Glassdoor, PayScale, or similar sources anywhere in our degree research.
How a ranking is computed
Programs are identified by their federal CIP code — the classification that determines which department actually grants the degree — never by the marketing name on a program page. A “social media marketing” concentration may be a Marketing degree (CIP 5214) at one school and a Communications degree (CIP 0901) at another, and those two carry materially different outcomes.
Within a CIP code we separate by credential level (associate, bachelor's, master's) and by delivery mode, using the Department's flag for programs offered exclusively via distance education. Rankings order institutions by median earnings four years after graduation. Field-level figures are medians of institution-level medians, with 25th and 75th percentiles reported so you can see the spread rather than only the midpoint.
What we exclude, and why it matters
The federal data suppresses programs with too few graduates to protect privacy, so small programs are absent — not failing, absent. Earnings cover only students who received federal financial aid; anyone who paid cash is invisible to the dataset.
We report the number of programs behind every figure. Where fewer than five institution-level values exist for a cut, we do not publish a median for it at all.
What these numbers cannot tell you
Rankings measure outcomes, not causation. A program serving mid-career students already earning six figures will post high medians regardless of what it teaches. Several of the highest-ranked online programs are degree-completion programs for working adults, and their figures partly reflect experience the degree did not create. We flag this wherever it plausibly applies.
The data is also a four-year snapshot. It does not capture careers that compound later, and it says nothing about debt — which is the other half of the return. A $66,000 median against $20,000 of borrowing is a good outcome; the same median against $90,000 is not.
Contrarian by default
Where the data contradicts the conventional advice, we publish the contradiction. We will tell you when a degree is not worth its price, when a certification would serve you better, and when the field a program is housed in matters more than the school name on the diploma. Nothing in our funding structure penalises us for saying so.
Updates and corrections
Articles carry a publication date and, where revised, an update date. When the Department of Education refreshes the underlying dataset we recompute and restate rather than quietly editing figures.
If you believe a number here is wrong, tell us and we will check it against the source and correct it publicly: partners@mfrow.com. We would rather be corrected than cited incorrectly.
Who produces this research
The Mayfaire Row Research Division is the research arm of Mayfaire Row Partners, an investment firm founded by a former Wall Street investment banker with direct involvement in over $20 billion of M&A, IPO, and capital raising transactions. We evaluate financial statements and underwrite businesses for a living, which is the same skill applied here: reading a dataset sceptically and reporting what it actually says.