NorthStar Education Finance
About NEF Pathways
NorthStar Education Finance, Inc. (NEF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Its purpose is to foster, aid, encourage, and assist the pursuit of higher education. NEF supports that purpose through the Total Higher Education (THE) Loan Program and through its grants program.
NEF Pathways is a lookup built for that work. It joins public occupation, program, and campus data so a student or advisor can see which college programs line up with a job, how much school that job usually takes, and which campuses offer the program.
Data sources
- O*NET 30.3 — occupation titles, descriptions, job zones, core tasks, essential skills, abilities, and work context.
- NCES / BLS CIP 2020 ↔ SOC 2018 crosswalk — 6,097 official program-to-occupation matches. This is the join key.
- College Scorecard Field of Study (April 17, 2025) — the full most-recent field file, joined by UNITID and 4-digit CIP. Program earnings are the published median 1 and 2 years after completion. Privacy-suppressed cells stay blank. 84 of the 99 campuses in this extract are in that file. The other 15 are local placeholders with no Scorecard program row.
What the query engine does
- Normalize the SOC or CIP you typed.
- Look up the occupation and its computed AI / human / task scores.
- Follow the official crosswalk to every matching CIP (or the reverse).
- Keep campuses whose CIP family (2-digit) is offered and that match the geography.
- Return cost, acceptance, completion, and earnings beside the risk fields.
Interest clusters
Six Holland-style clusters — investigative, social, realistic, conventional, artistic, and enterprising — map onto SOC prefixes so a student can browse occupations without knowing a code.
What’s next
- Refresh O*NET and the Field of Study file on each federal release.
- Caseloads and export to Excel.
- Validate the risk ranking against published AI-exposure studies.