About

What Opportunity Data is

A rare public asset: the A.I. exposure of academic programs and occupations, what graduates go on to earn, and Workforce Pell as it takes shape, public federal data turned to a single question, not where opportunity stands today, but how it is changing.

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About

About Opportunity Data.

Opportunity Data is an independent research platform dedicated to building open infrastructure from public data.

Our work transforms complex public datasets into practical measures that support better decisions across higher education, workforce development, and public policy. We develop original statistical frameworks, publish open analyses, and create tools that help others understand how education, labor markets, and artificial intelligence are reshaping opportunity.

Our mission is to build the public statistical infrastructure needed to understand how artificial intelligence and other economic forces are reshaping labor markets. Using federal administrative data, we develop open datasets, interactive tools, and evidence-based analyses that help policymakers, researchers, educational institutions, employers, and workers make better decisions.

Every analysis is grounded in transparent methods, reproducible workflows, and publicly available data wherever possible.

The platform integrates information from sources including IPEDS, the Postsecondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO) dataset, federal labor statistics, apprenticeship data, Workforce Pell implementation, and other administrative datasets to produce practical measures of workforce demand, educational supply, earnings, and A.I. exposure.

Opportunity Data exists to make complex public data usable, for understanding not only where opportunity exists today, but how it is changing.

What we build

What We Build.

Opportunity Data develops durable statistical infrastructure that others can reuse, rather than reports that describe a single moment in time. Our work includes:

Each project is designed to become a reusable public resource for researchers, policymakers, institutions, journalists, and the public.

Workforce Pell

Workforce Pell, fully tracked.

A complete portfolio for the program that extends federal Pell Grants to short-term job training on July 1, 2026, from credential eligibility screening to state implementation. The Value-Added Earnings Test approximates the federal earnings threshold program by program, using the best available public data. The State Readiness Tracker follows each governor's progress in standing up the approval pipeline. The State Approval Comparison puts every published state framework side by side, from Pennsylvania's 19 eligible occupations to North Carolina's 364. Together they answer the questions institutions and policymakers are asking right now: which programs will qualify, how each state draws the line, and when students can enroll.

A.I. exposure

A.I. exposure across academic programs and occupations.

A three-dimensional scoring of how exposed each academic program and occupation is to A.I.-driven change. The academic programs that train the workforce, classified by CIP code, are rarely scored for A.I. exposure; this index scores 1,786 academic programs (CIP) alongside the 772 occupations they feed. Occupation-level exposure measures are well established; program-level scoring is not. Each is scored across digital intensity, human interaction shield, and physical anchor, built from O*NET work characteristics and weighted by BLS national employment counts. Explore the index.

Post-secondary earnings

Post-secondary earnings of graduates.

Earnings trajectories at 1, 5, and 10 years after graduation, drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau's Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes. PSEO is administrative wage data sourced from state unemployment insurance records, not survey responses. 900+ institutions across 33 states, three credential levels (certificates, associate, bachelor's), with full transparency about which programs are too small to report. Browse earnings data.

What the platform covers
1,786
academic programs scored for A.I. exposure
900+
institutions with graduate earnings
51
states and DC tracked for Workforce Pell readiness
Who it serves

Who it serves.

The work was built with prospective students in mind, someone weighing whether a welding certificate or a child development bachelor's will pay off. The same data and structure now serve a wider policy audience:

Each of these audiences needs the same underlying view: trajectories rather than snapshots, distributions rather than averages, and an honest accounting of what the data does and does not show.

What ties it together

What ties it together.

Every score, threshold, and earnings figure traces back to a published public data source. Every dataset comes with an explicit accounting of what is observable and what is suppressed. Every comparison happens at the program or occupation level rather than at a single national average.

The goal

Make rigorous evidence accessible to the people making decisions about education, workforce policy, and economic opportunity.

Selected writing

Research and commentary published in The Colorado Sun, Washington Monthly, and Community College Daily.

Working with partners

The platform partners with colleges and university systems, state workforce boards and higher education agencies, philanthropies, and research teams, applying its data and methods to the questions they face, from program-portfolio reviews to Workforce Pell approval policy.

Get in touch Compare the states

Get in touch

Media: bio and downloadable headshots on the press page.