The Indiana Pathways Advisor draws one student's path — high school, college, how that college's students actually do, what the programs pay, and what work is nearby — for any of the 530 Indiana high schools in the state's college-going file. Every number on it was downloaded in August 2026 from files that Indiana and the federal government publish for anybody, with no login and no special access anywhere in it. What is not published is how those files connect to each other, and this page is where those connections are written down.
Here is the demo's default walk — Merrillville High School, an Ivy Tech health program, registered nurses — with every link in the chain named. Two of the six links are published by the agencies themselves and one leans on a federal crosswalk; the other three had to be built by hand. Each link below carries its method and the thing most likely to be wrong with it.
The Commission's college-going file gives every school a LocationId, and the Department of Education's school directory uses the same id, zero-padded to four characters. That is where a school's city, county and corporation come from. 526 of the 530 schools match; the other four closed or were renamed after the 2024 cohort, and they keep blank directory fields rather than a guess.
The state's high-school employment file carries no corporation id of any kind, so a corporation's name is the only thing left to match on. Capitalization, punctuation and spacing are smoothed out first, and seven remaining spellings are matched up by hand; 342 of the 374 corporations that graduate a class find a row. What could go wrong: matching two spellings by hand is a judgment that they mean the same organization. The other 32 have no row in that file under any name — 11 career centers and special-education cooperatives whose students are counted at their home corporation, 11 adult-education campuses with no defensible one-to-one counterpart, and 10 charter schools whose first class graduated after the file froze in December 2023. Those schools get a message that names the freeze rather than a zero.
Nothing in the state's files or the federal ones maps an Indiana county to an Ivy Tech region. This one was built by reading all 19 Ivy Tech campus "about" pages on August 10, 2026 and taking each campus's own "Counties Served" list, then mapping campus to region. The 19 lists cover all 92 counties exactly: none is claimed by two campuses, none is left out. What could go wrong: it is a snapshot of pages the college can rewrite tomorrow, and two counties took a judgment call (both are in the next section).
The Commission publishes graduates by Area of Study but never says which CIP program codes sit inside each area, so the 40 CIP series present in the federal earnings file were assigned to the seven areas by hand, with the four-digit programs actually in the file checked before each call. Health is kept to CIP 51 alone, so the pay stage's health counts line up with the college-going file's own Health area. What could go wrong: several families have a foot in two buckets — agriculture, communications technologies, parks and recreation among them. Each call is written down in the code with its reasoning, and someone should feel free to overrule any of them.
NCES publishes a CIP-to-SOC crosswalk, and it is genuinely many-to-many: 6,097 rows saying that a program and an occupation are plausibly related. It does not say that a program leads to a job, and nothing on this demo says so either. The occupations behind each interest were hand-picked from that crosswalk, then checked to be sure every one has a published employment and wage estimate both in the school's own labor market and statewide — 28 of 28 pass. What could go wrong: a shortlist is an opinion about which related occupations are worth putting in front of a 16-year-old.
Four interests cannot cover the federal catalog, so a walk carrying a program none of them covers can ask about that program instead — and there the crosswalk is joined to the wage file by machine, with no hand-checking at all: every occupation it links to the program, ranked by how many people are employed in each one in that labor market. The 194 crosswalk rows that say a program matched no occupation are dropped before the join rather than counted as one. That screen says it was machine-joined, and it drops the credential accents the hand-picked strips carry, because nothing in the join says which credential reaches which job. What could go wrong: the crosswalk is blunt. The largest occupation it links to aerospace engineering in Northwest Indiana is architectural and engineering managers, not aerospace engineers — the join is showing you the labor market, not a career path.
BLS publishes the county-to-area definitions, and they put Lake, Porter, Newton and Jasper counties in the Chicago metro. There is no Gary area anywhere in this data, so Merrillville's wage panel is a Chicago-metro panel and is labeled as one — that metro is Northwest Indiana's labor market, and it includes the Illinois side of the line. 526 of the 530 schools are placed this way, 160 of them into one of the three Indiana nonmetropolitan areas.
The question row at the top of the walk asks about a campus, a program and a credential together, which is how the question actually gets asked out loud: "what if she went to Purdue West Lafayette for aerospace engineering?" Any of the 16 Indiana public campuses goes in the first blank, any credential in the last, and any program the federal catalog names in the middle. The program box searches two lists at once — the programs this campus publishes earnings for, and the federal list of program names — so a program the campus has no published row for comes back with the reason beside it rather than missing from the results. The one question it cannot take is a college outside Indiana's public system: the earnings files behind these screens cover Indiana public campuses only, so the campus list is that list and nothing more.
Two paths can sit on one chart. Pinning the path on screen copies it into the address bar under five keys of its own, and from there the walk carries both — the pinned path draws beside the live one in its own color, and it keeps its place in the rail even when the federal file publishes nothing for it. The difference between them is claimed only where both paths publish a year-5 median; where one is withheld the chip says so and the chart goes back to its single-path title. Where the two pool different numbers of graduating classes, the sentence under the chart names that before it says anything about the gap.
Every pay number on the walk comes from Indiana public campuses, and that is a much bigger hole at some schools than at others. 26% of Carmel High School's Class of 2024 enrolled out of state or at a private college, where neither the federal earnings file nor the state's own wage file can see them; at Merrillville it is 13%. So the walk prints that share on the schools where it is large instead of leaving it here, because it changes how the rest of the screen should be read. It is the same gap the closing panel of the walk names under "Employment outcomes": Indiana's own published files stop at enrollment, persistence and completion, and the pay half of this demo had to be borrowed from a federal file and from a state file that has not been updated since December 2023.
One rule about switching schools is worth writing down, because it is the one thing here a reader might find surprising: your own picks follow you to the next school, and anything the last school had answered for you gets answered again by the new one. A walk that opened on Ivy Tech Region 1 because Merrillville sits in Lake County lands on Carmel's own largest campus and program when the school changes, while a walk that was moved to Purdue West Lafayette on purpose is still at Purdue afterwards.
Ivy Tech is one college with campuses in 19 Indiana cities, and the files name it three different ways. The federal earnings file names it by region number ("Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana - Region 6"); the Commission names campuses by city ("Ivy Tech Community College-Muncie"); nothing in either set of files maps the two. Each of the 13 regional ids was resolved through the 2010 IPEDS directory (read from the Urban Institute's Education Data API), which still carries the pre-consolidation campus names against those exact ids — 13 of 13 resolved, and 17 of the 19 city campuses land on one of the 13 regions.
There is no Region 8, which is the kind of hole in a sequence that usually means a row got dropped somewhere. Here the reason is the college's own history. Region 8 was Central Indiana (Indianapolis), OPE id 00991700; when Ivy Tech consolidated to a single accreditation in 2011 that id became the college's own, and the federal file now publishes it under the unnumbered label "Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana" — so the missing region is the row this demo simply calls Ivy Tech.
That row is not a statewide total, and the demo never labels it as one. At the associate level its pooled count of graduates with earnings one year out is 26,461, against 67,731 for the 13 numbered regions combined, so the demo treats it as one large campus. The two city campuses with no numbered region of their own, Indianapolis and Hamilton County, fall back to it. Completion is a separate matter again: the Commission's completion file reports Ivy Tech once for the whole college, so wherever an Ivy Tech completion rate appears on screen the row says "all campuses" rather than borrowing the number for the region in view.
Two county assignments in the region crosswalk are judgment calls, and both are worth knowing about:
Each source hides small numbers its own way. All three are translated once, when these files are built, into the same four states — published, hidden, too recent to measure, or not applicable — which is why one legend can cover the whole walk. A number the state hides is never turned into a zero and never dropped: it keeps its place on the screen, wearing the mark that says what happened to it.
| Source | What it writes | What it means here |
|---|---|---|
| Commission college-going and completion | DS, ***, or an empty cell |
hidden by the state to protect students in small groups |
| Management Performance Hub high-school employment | the literal word Suppressed |
hidden by the state to protect students in small groups |
| Census PSEO | status code 5 |
hidden by the Census to protect small groups |
| Census PSEO | status code -1 |
cohort too recent to measure — the only thing dashes ever mean on this demo |
Wider than this screen — scroll it sideways to see the rest.
Eight files carry the whole demo. Each one is a trimmed-down copy of a published file — only the rows and columns these screens read — kept alongside the code so the screens can be rebuilt at any time. The full original downloads are not kept here. Every download happened on August 10, 2026.
| File | What it holds | Publisher and vintage | Downloaded |
|---|---|---|---|
high_schools.csv · 530 rows |
Every school in the college-going file, with its city, county, school corporation and BLS labor market | Indiana Commission for Higher Education, 2024 cohort · Indiana Department of Education directory, 2025–26 · BLS area definitions, May 2024 | Aug 10, 2026 |
college_going.csv.gz · 23,941 rows |
Graduates and college enrollment by school and breakout for the class of 2024, plus the classes of 2016 through 2023 for the trend line | Indiana Commission for Higher Education · College-Going Dataset, 2024 cohort plus the earlier per-cohort workbooks | Aug 10, 2026 |
completion.csv · 388 rows |
Persistence, on-time and extended-time completion for the 16 Indiana public campuses | Indiana Commission for Higher Education · College Completion Dataset, 2026 release | Aug 10, 2026 |
pseo_earnings.csv.gz · 8,249 rows |
Earnings 1, 5 and 10 years after a credential, by campus, program and degree level | U.S. Census Bureau · Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes, Indiana earnings, 2025Q4 release | Aug 10, 2026 |
pseo_flows.csv.gz · 53,613 rows |
Employed graduates by industry sector, and how many of them are working in Indiana | U.S. Census Bureau · Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes, Indiana flows, 2025Q4 release | Aug 10, 2026 |
mph_outcomes.csv.gz · 28,705 rows |
Wages and sustained employment for high-school graduates, by school corporation and years out | Indiana Management Performance Hub · cohorts 2010–2021, last updated December 2023 | Aug 10, 2026 |
oews.csv.gz · 8,084 rows |
Employment and wages by occupation for Indiana and its 15 metro and 3 nonmetro areas | Indiana DWD / Indiana Business Research Center · BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 estimates | Aug 10, 2026 |
cip_soc_links.csv · 6,097 rows |
Which programs and occupations the federal crosswalk says are plausibly related, and the file the four-digit program names come from | National Center for Education Statistics · CIP 2020 to SOC 2018 crosswalk | Aug 10, 2026 |
Wider than this screen — scroll it sideways to see the rest.
The crosswalk names six-digit programs, not the four-digit families this demo shows, so the family names are derived from it: a family takes the name of the member program the file marks General, and otherwise the name of its lowest-numbered member. 149 of the 458 families are named the second way, and those names are narrower than the family behind them — CIP 51.38 is named for registered nursing and covers 23 nursing programs.
che_college_value_2020.twbx — the Commission's own Tableau
workbook of wage outcomes by institution, degree level and program, frozen at roughly the
2018 cohorts. It was read as a state-produced cross-check on the federal earnings figures.
Nothing was extracted from it, and no number on this demo comes from it.
This demo is a sibling of Government Data, Decoded, which does the same kind of work on North Carolina's published data: there, the state ships a data dictionary and the code turns it into a browsable database automatically. Indiana publishes no such dictionary, which is why this one is a walk through links somebody had to build by hand.