Where Boilermakers Land: Spring 2025 Post Graduate Data Dashboard

Every Boilermaker takes a giant leap at graduation. But where do those leaps land? What does the persistent pursuit of a Purdue degree look like one, two, five years down the road?

Students, families, employers, and faculty ask these questions every day, and for more than 25 years, Purdue’s Center for Career Opportunities (CCO) has been working to answer them. Now updated with data from spring 2025 graduates, the Post Graduate Data Dashboard brings those answers together in one publicly accessible place.

The dashboard is built on the Post-Graduation Outcomes Survey, which the CCO administers to bachelor’s degree recipients within six months of graduation. It captures employment status, starting salaries, job titles, employers, industries, internship experience, geographic placement, and more, all presented in an accessible format, filterable by college, major, and year.

IDA+A maintains the dashboard and publishes it through Purdue’s Data Digest. A version is also available on the CCO’s website. The public-facing dashboard is open to any user; a login-required version available to the Purdue community includes additional demographic detail.

The dashboard draws a wide range of users. Prospective students and their families utilize it to understand where a given major can lead and what graduates in those programs typically earn. Current students explore majors in the dashboard, while faculty, university administrators, accreditation bodies, and peer institutions also rely on the data.

“A lot of students find it very useful,” said Matthew Rausch, career systems data and website manager at the CCO. “They look at their own programs to say, what kinds of jobs do students get? What kinds of things can I even do with this degree? And at a glance, they can see where students are going.”

Employers recruiting at Purdue consult the dashboard to benchmark their offers against market rates, and according to CCO staff, that comparison has prompted some companies to adjust their salary offers accordingly.

“The dashboard is incredibly useful. It’s a public resource. That’s the way we view it,” said Stephen Roach, director of operations, strategic initiatives, data analytics and employer engagement at the CCO. “We want people to access it and leverage it for their needs.”

The CCO has been doing this work since 1999. The platforms have evolved; the commitment hasn’t. And because of that continuity, the dashboard is more than a snapshot: it’s a record of Boilermakers building a better world, year after year. The current version spans five years of data, and the story it tells is one of steady, measurable growth — starting salaries for Purdue bachelor’s graduates have risen consistently over that period.

Raw data doesn’t tell stories on its own. That’s where IDA+A comes in. The department takes the CCO’s survey data and transforms it into a clean, accessible, and consistently updated dashboard, one that anyone can use, regardless of their technical background. This year, that work went deeper: IDA+A consolidated the dashboard’s underlying data infrastructure and rebuilt the interface to meet ADA accessibility standards, making it more sustainable to maintain and easier to navigate for everyone.

“We gave the dashboard a huge overhaul this year,” said Ottlie Webb, data analyst at IDA+A, who led this year’s redesign. “The look and feel is better, and it opened up a lot more functionality.”

The next small step is yours. The Post-Graduation Outcomes Dashboard, now updated with spring 2025 graduate data, is available via Purdue’s Data Digest.

Purdue faculty and staff who would like to know how their graduates are represented in the data, or how their area can help strengthen it, can reach out to the CCO.