How we research this

This site carries information that people make expensive decisions on: whether to enroll in a program, whether a credential is worth holding, whether a career is reachable from where they are now. So it is worth saying plainly where it all comes from.

Where the records come from

Schools, certifications, scholarships and professional associations are held as records rather than written into prose. Each record names its source: the school, the body that issues the credential, or the organization that awards the funding. Where you see a link on one of those pages, it goes to that organization’s own site, not to a summary of it.

Every outbound link is checked to make sure it resolves before it is published. A link that looks precise but returns a 404 is worse than a general one that works, so where we could not verify a deep link we use the organization’s own index page instead.

What we do about the things nobody publishes

A great deal of this field has no official data, and pretending otherwise would be the easiest way to be wrong.

Pay. A figure appears on a career page only where the US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes an occupation that genuinely matches the role, and it is printed with the occupation it describes, the reference period and a link, so you can check exactly what is being claimed. Where the closest BLS occupation is broader than the role, the label says so: an estate planning attorney sees the median for lawyers as a whole, because BLS does not measure estate practice separately.

For many of these careers BLS publishes nothing at all. There is no death doula occupation, no coroner occupation, no personal historian occupation, and physicians are reported as one combined group rather than by specialty. Those pages say “not published” and explain why. We would rather tell you the data does not exist than invent a range.

Scholarships. Amounts are omitted where the current cycle could not be confirmed, and closed cycles say they are closed rather than inviting an application that cannot be made. Where a career has no funding we could find, the page says “none found” - which is not the same as none existing, and we say that too.

Licensing. Requirements are set state by state and change. We describe the general shape and tell you to confirm with your own state board. We do not maintain a state-by-state table of the most volatile information in the field, because a table that is quietly out of date is more dangerous than no table.

What we will not publish

A salary range we cannot source.
A credential presented as required when it is voluntary. The difference between a license you must legally hold, a certification that proves competence, and training that simply teaches you the work is the most useful distinction on this site, and we keep it even when an organization’s own marketing blurs it.
A program we cannot verify exists.
A career page padded out to look as substantial as the others. Some of this work has no standard route into it, and those pages are shorter because that is the truth about them.

When we last looked

Record pages carry the month they were last checked. That date means a person went and looked at the source, not that the page was edited. Where a record has not been rechecked recently, the date says so rather than being quietly refreshed.

Telling us we are wrong

Every record page has a “suggest a correction” link, and it reaches a person rather than a queue. If you do one of these jobs and your career page describes it badly, that is the most useful message we can get, and we would rather hear it bluntly than not at all.

Corrections that change what the page claims are checked against the source before they go in, the same as anything else.