What's this all about?

You may hear about how you can get X job with Y degree -- but how many people with that degree actually ever work in that job? How many people with the degree you're thinking of go into completely different careers, or go into a career only somewhat related to their degree? What do they do 1 year, 5 years, 10 years out? Course Decode helps answer these questions via analysis of large numbers of college-educated people on LinkedIn. Search a degree, or a degree at a certain college, and see what types of jobs and careers people who have done that degree have.

For now Course Decode is a free and ad-free service.

What is a "relevance score" and how is it calculated?

For each LinkedIn profile, we want to give a score from 0 to 100 on how relevant their career has been to the Bachelor degree they did. We can then put all these scores together to give a reasonable picture for each degree on whether it tends to be used by its graduates or not.

Here's how it's calculated: for each profile, we give each job they have had a score of either 0 (if it has nothing in common with their degree), 0.5 (if it may be only somewhat related) or 1 (if it's directly relevant to their degree), then do a weighted average calculation (taking into account how long each job was done) to get the overall relevance score .

For example, if a person has done 3 jobs, and the first 2 jobs were directly related to their degree and the 3rd job was only somewhat related, the scores would be 1, 1 and 0.5. Suppose the 1st job was done for 12 months, the 2nd job was done for 3 months and the 3rd job was done for 6 months. The relevance score would = (1*12+1*3+0.5*6) / (12+3+6) = 85% relevance score.

If a profile has a relevance score above 70%, we consider that person to have gone into a career highly relevant to their degree. A relevance score from 40 to 70% indicates the degree may have only been partially used in the persons career, or it's unclear. A relevance score below 40% means we think the person definitely hasn't used their degree in their career.

Caveats and considerations

This service is intended to serve as a guide only for people thinking about doing certain degrees, not a definitive and comprehensive resource.

Please consider:

• Our data is solely LinkedIn profiles, which will be biased towards people have remained in the corporate world and/or remained in their field. A college educated person who becomes an artist or waiter, for example, is much less likely to have a LinkedIn page, and people who have switched field entirely may not always list a non-relevant degree on their LinkedIn page.
• Our analysis does not include profiles with no job history listed, since we don't know how many of these are people who have never found a job or simply abandoned LinkedIn and never updated their profile. We found about 20% of profiles with a bachelor degree on LinkedIn have no job history (far too high to assume all these people were unable to find a job).
• Our analysis is done by AI and may be flawed or open to interpretation, especially for more general degrees. We encourage you to browse through sample profiles and come to your own conclusions.
• Even if most people who do a certain degree work in that field, this is still only one part of the equation. You also need to consider questions like: Do people in this field make good money? How demanding is it? Are people in this field usually happy or miserable? And so on.
• Currently our data and analysis only includes people from the US, and due to significant costs involved, covers only a fairly small fraction of all US-based LinkedIn profiles.

Data policy

We only analyze public LinkedIn profiles, and use LinkedIn profile data only for analysis of degrees and colleges. We have zero interest in, and will never, use LinkedIn profile data for any marketing or lead gen purposes. As such, all profiles listed here are anonymized with any names and emails removed.

Contact

Please email hello@coursedecode.com.