Today marks a big step forward for both Epicodus, and code schools throughout the nation!
Epicodus has always been transparent about our student outcomes. In fact, we feel so passionately about honesty and transparency that we actually helped found the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR) to standardize transparency in outcomes reporting in all code schools.
Today, we're very excited to share our first batch of outcomes data using the new standardized CIRR methodologies and format. This information reports the outcomes of all students who entered our program in the first half of 2016.
Since Epicodus's very first course, prospective students have asked what percentage of our graduates find jobs. And we've always done our best to track and share that information. However, early on we came to realize that a single "job placement rate" statistic unintentionally hid a lot of important details, like how to count students who don't actually seek work, or how to report students who start their own business. So we stopped reporting a single percentage and began reporting the outcomes of all students who attended Epicodus, broken down into several different categories.
We're very excited that CIRR has adopted our approach, with a few tweaks based on the input of all the members. CIRR offers a simple rubric to report the wide variety of different outcomes our graduates have. This includes full-time, part-time and contract employment, entrepreneurship, and more. CIRR has also created a set of standards for reporting our graduates' salary outcomes that we're very excited about.
As of today, we're reporting our outcomes using the new CIRR format, along with 15 other schools. So, as a prospective student, you can easily compare any CIRR schools you're interested in using the same metrics. Additionally, another 25 schools have already asked to join since CIRR's first public announcement last month! If you're considering attending a school that isn't a CIRR member, we encourage you to ask them to join so you can compare their student outcomes, too.
To the best of our knowledge, CIRR is the first time any group of schools has ever come together to establish a transparent, comparable set of outcomes reporting standards.* And, while no universities currently employ this same CIRR format, we can still roughly compare our outcomes to those of more traditional two- and four-year institutions as a whole. In those institutions 55% of first-time students graduate within 6 years; 35.7% of returning college attendees ever finish; and 27.3% of graduates work in a field related to their major. We're hopeful that CIRR standards pave the way for all higher education institutions to report outcomes data in a transparent, comparable format--not just code schools.
* The American Bar Association's employment summary reports for law schools is the closest standard to CIRR, but it does not include the length of time graduates take to find employment, and does not include salary data. The US Department of Education College Scorecard reports only on data from federal financial aid recipients, only 10 years after starting school, and only median salary. Some schools report outcomes based on their own definitions, but not in a comparable way. We're not aware of any other sets of comparable outcomes data.