Walk through the 2025 College Majors Completion App, which tracks graduation data from over 2,700 colleges. Filter by state, degree level, and major to see which colleges graduate the most students in your field, or check what majors dominate a specific college's output. Use it to find schools with strong completion numbers in your major or spot when a college barely graduates anyone in what you want to study.
Chapters
This is the tutorial for the 2025 College Majors Completion App, the student and family version. What we're looking at here is an app that takes data that colleges themselves have submitted to the National Center for Education Statistics, and we've broken it out by more than 2,700 private 4-year colleges and public 2- and 4-year colleges to be able to let users see which colleges have a lot of completed, and of course which colleges don't have very many majors completed at all in a given major. I will tell you, as you can see on the top of the screen, there are 64 majors. We chose the common majors from hundreds of other options, and there are 1,798 colleges reporting bachelor's degrees. And we also show associate's degrees on this, and there are 1,400+ colleges showing associate degrees. For this version of the app, there are two major tabs: the By Major that we'll look at and the By College tab that we'll look at. For the student and family version, there are years 2022 and 2023 that you can look at. We also have included degree levels, associate's degree and bachelor's degree, that student and family members can look at. The full version, the leadership version for colleges themselves, includes a master's version. And of course, we can sort it by state, we can sort it by those 64 majors. We've set it up so you can look by sector, and sector is private for your nonprofits. Public 2-year and public 4-year and above. And of course, we can also look at individual combinations of colleges, some 2,700 total colleges included. Let's start by looking at 2023, and let's look at bachelor's degree, and let's just pick a state. Let's look at Ohio. So we'll bring up Ohio, and let's just look at the sector of private colleges. So these are all the private colleges in Ohio. That are 4-year private colleges. And you can see in the bottom right, we even provide a graphic representation. Now, there's a lot of colleges that offer a lot of majors, so let's be a little bit more specific and let's just choose a major. Let's just choose— we'll start on top— accounting and related services. So we can see in the state, bottom right, we can see the graphic representation. And then when I hold my pointer over the top of the pie chart, we can see that Franklin University has a large market share, and there are many colleges that have a much smaller market share. If you want to zoom in on that, that's what that magnifying glass is for. You can zoom in and see which which college is which. I can also click on the right-hand side and see which college is shown here. So for example, Walsh University has only not even 3% of the total biology market share of private colleges in Ohio. Now, how would you use that? You would use that if you're looking at college major or majors that your student, your child, yourself were looking at, and you want to look for colleges that have large volumes. If a college is, for example, journalism— if you're looking at journalism and private colleges in Ohio, or any other combination of states, public and private, you want to look for a college that has significant numbers of majors completing journalism. And let's talk— in fact, let's look at it because we have journalism in here. Let's bring up journalism. And for an example, in the state of Ohio— so in the state of Ohio, there's a handful or so of colleges offer journalism majors. And we can see just looking at the data in the middle table that is pretty evenly spread out. Nobody is dominant. You know, if I'm looking at journalism in just the state of Ohio, I might think about expanding my search into Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, those kind of states, just to look at colleges that might have more substantial graduation majors from an individual major itself. Let's look at the By College tab. Now what we're looking at here is we're looking at all the selected majors. So I'm going to go back down here and I'm going to select all majors. And what we're going to see listed, we're going to do it by the bachelor's level. And we're going to look at colleges and find someone here with some significant numbers. So we're looking at here is the bachelor's degrees. What we're looking at here is the bachelor's degree in 2022 and 2023 for all of the private colleges in Ohio. And as we scroll through this, some we can see don't offer a lot that are on the list. Antioch College, for example, offers majors in these areas. And you can see what the major's completion was. There are 5 people, 5 students who graduated with a psychology major in 2022 from Antioch College, and 2 graduated in 2023. You can see the total number, and what we've calculated here is the, what's called the internal market share. So at Antioch, for what we're showing here, 41% of their majors in 2022 graduated with psychology degree of the majors shown. What we showed on the by major tab was the market share. For in all the colleges. So this is one college, this is one college, this is one college. You can see the college name as I roll over the top. When we go back to by college, this is internal market share. Let's scroll down and find one with a little bit larger offering, and let's look at University of Rio Grande. You can see where a college has a large number of majors and what percentage that major is in a given year. So special education and teaching appears to be a specialty at University of Rio Grande in 2022. They had 23 graduates. It was about 35% of their total internal market share of the major shown. You can also look at it the other way. Let's look at— say we'll stay with the University of Rio Grande, and they also have no math majors. They had one in 2023. They have very limited chemistry, communications, fine arts, and studio arts. This is the other end that you want to look at. Colleges in this day and era are looking to offer those majors where they get the most students and generate the most tuition revenue. If a college has a low number of majors Let's look at another one, Lake Erie College. You can see a significant number of low enrollment majors, low completion majors for these, for these degrees. You want to think twice about selecting a college with a small number of majors. You want to look at degrees. If you're focusing on a college, look at the numbers of degrees that are larger. And again, to be fair, you can look at this number. These are seniors that graduated, so 7 in 1 year, and you can logically multiply that times 4 because there's freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. So there's about 30. Give or take, in criminal justice and corrections at Lake Erie College. To start all over, you can clear the filters down here, and you can select a different state. We'll select Arkansas. Let's look at public colleges, look at public 4-year in Arkansas. And again, the same kind of data that you're looking at. Look at all the years selected, and we can see the offerings for bachelor's degrees for all public 4-year colleges in Arkansas. Those might be the ones on your search list. And look at where there's strong numbers, where there are less strong numbers, and help that determine how comfortable you would be choosing a college with a major or majors that you're interested in. So the College Majors Completion app, the student and family version, is to help students and their families look at colleges that not only meet their other criteria but have a significant number of students graduating in that major. If you're looking at colleges that have low graduation numbers in a given major, ask the college why. Ask if they have plans to increase that number, and just make that another factor in considering which colleges will be best.
