Skip to content
← Portfolio

The College Navigator

DC CAP Innovation Hub · live since October 15, 2026

The College Navigator is DC CAP’s free career and college exploration tool for D.C. high school students and the counselors, coaches, and families around them.

A student can see how careers fit her interests and what they pay here, which programs and partner colleges lead to them, what graduates of those programs earn, and how much of the cost federal and DC CAP support can offset. It supports DC CAP Scholars’ University Partners recruitment process.

Try the Navigator

The answers already exist, spread across fifteen public data sources

A student choosing between nursing and business administration had no easy way to compare what graduates of each program earn, what those jobs pay in D.C., or how many openings the city expects. Her counselor, often responsible for hundreds of students, needed that assembled before the student walked in. In 2024–25 the national student-to-school-counselor ratio was 372 to 1 against the recommended 250 to 1 (American School Counselor Association, n.d.). We built the Navigator so the assembly happens before the conversation starts.

  • O*NETcareers and interests
  • College Scorecardcost, program earnings and debt
  • BLS wages (OEWS)what a career pays here
  • BLS projectionsnational growth
  • DC DOES projectionsopenings D.C. expects
  • Census ACSwhat degrees lead to locally
  • Census job-to-job flowshow workers move between jobs
  • Census PSEOwhat program graduates earn
  • CIP-SOC crosswalkwhich programs lead to which careers
  • IPEDS enrollmentwhere D.C. students start college
  • Carnegie Classificationstypes of colleges
  • ESCOskills
  • MIT Living Wagewhat it costs to live here
  • DC TAGD.C. tuition grant rules
  • Federal Pell maximumthe Pell ceiling
The public data sources the Navigator is built on.

Whether a degree pays off depends on where a student lives

Strada Education Foundation research finds that 82 percent of D.C. bachelor’s graduates see a positive ten-year return on their degree, the highest share in the country, against 69 percent nationally and 56 percent in the lowest state (Torpey-Saboe & Cook Escobar, 2026). A D.C. student reading national headlines about whether college is worth it is often reading the wrong numbers, and the accurate answer for her is local and program-specific.

Bachelor’s graduates with a positive ten-year return

D.C.82%
United States69%
Lowest state (Vermont)56%
Source: Torpey-Saboe & Cook Escobar (2026), Strada Education Foundation.

How a student uses it

She opens the Navigator on her phone or on a counselor’s screen, with no login and no personal information asked of her, and starts from one of four places. Each path ends in the same saved plan, which lives on her own device and opens on her counselor’s screen from a link she sends.

Where does she start?

Pick a starting point. Each one takes her down its own path to the same saved plan.

  1. Her interests

    She taps what she is drawn to and gets careers that fit.

  2. Careers

    D.C.-area pay, projected growth, and the openings D.C. projects, sortable by each.

  3. Programs and colleges

    The programs that lead there and the partner colleges that offer them.

  4. Cost

    How DC TAG (where it applies), Pell, and a DC CAP award (if matched) stack against the college’s published cost, with the FAFSA and DC TAG steps called out.

  5. Saved plan

    A plan on her own device that opens on her counselor’s screen from a link she sends.

The cost question, on one screen

For each partner college, the Navigator stacks the aid a D.C. student can count on against the college’s published cost of attendance, so she and her counselor can see what is left before she applies.

Illustration: one college

Cost of attendance
How it gets paid
DC TAG
Pell
DC CAP award
Left to cover
The proportions here are illustrative. In the Navigator, each segment uses that college’s published cost and the current award rules. DC TAG counts only where it applies, the student sets her expected Pell amount, and the DC CAP award applies only if she is matched as a University Partners Scholar.

How we built it

Early on we decided that matching would run on a student’s selections and fixed public tables, so every student who selects the same interests sees the same careers and a counselor can explain why. We also required that every number on screen trace to a specific column in a public dataset, or be computed from one, and name its source; where D.C. data does not exist for a career, the Navigator shows the national pay figure and labels it, and leaves out openings D.C. does not project.

The Navigator draws on fifteen public data sources, and the platform behind it covers 332 careers and more than 3,500 institutions. The federal crosswalk from field of study to careers treats every listed occupation as equally likely and reads the same in every city, so we kept it and added local evidence. Adapting a method the federal Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic developed for one D.C. university, we measured from anonymized Census survey records what employed D.C.-area adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher do for work with each degree (U.S. Census Bureau, 2025). Among those with a degree in computer science or information systems, about 28 in 100 work as software developers, and the rest spread across computer support, information security, management, and dozens of other jobs.

D.C.-area adults with a bachelor’s or higher in computer science or information systems

About 28 in 100: software developers Dozens of other jobs
Covers everyone in the region’s current workforce with this degree, including people who graduated decades ago. Source: American Community Survey microdata, D.C. metro.

What comes next

The Navigator is the first of four products planned for the platform: Scholar Pathways for DC CAP’s own college scholars and GEAR UP students, a public explorer for any D.C. student or family, and a regional version built on published methods and open-source code.

  1. Live since October 15, 2026

    College Navigator

    D.C. high school students applying to DC CAP’s programs, and the counselors, coaches, and families around them

  2. Planned: Fall 2027 through Fall 2028

    Scholar Pathways

    DC CAP’s college scholars and GEAR UP students, moving from major to career

  3. Planned: by October 2027

    D.C. Public Explorer

    Any D.C. student or family, with no login and no personal data

  4. Planned: after the public release

    Regional platform

    Communities beyond D.C., through published methods and open-source code

How the work is funded

The platform and its first products

Funded by a $600,000 grant from the KPMG AI Impact Initiative, through September 2028.

An open practitioner's guide to the methods

This work is grant-funded.

The DC community work around the tool

This work is grant-funded.

If you advise students or build tools like this elsewhere, I’d welcome walking you through the Navigator and the design decisions behind it. Get in touch.

References

  • American School Counselor Association. (n.d.). School counselor roles & ratios. Retrieved September 17, 2026, from https://www.schoolcounselor.org/About-School-Counseling/School-Counselor-Roles-Ratios
  • Torpey-Saboe, N., & Cook Escobar, M. (2026, July 30). Beyond the average: The uneven geography of college ROI. Strada Education Foundation. https://www.strada.org/stories/beyond-the-average-the-uneven-geography-of-college-roi
  • U.S. Census Bureau. (2025). American Community Survey 5-year Public Use Microdata Sample, 2020–2024 [Data set]. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/microdata.html