WA Graduate Outcomes - Earnings, Completion & Remedial (wa-graduate-outcomes)

Pull Washington high-school graduate outcomes - from WA OSPI's graduate-outcomes data (3.4M+ records across three tables, free public open data): how much a district's graduates earn after high school, whether they complete a post-secondary degree, and whether they need remedial (catch-up) college courses.

This is the output side of WA's K-12 school system - what happens to a high school's graduates after they leave. It is the sibling of WA School Enrollment (wa-school-enrollment): enrollment is the inputs (who is coming into the district), this is the outcomes (how their graduates do). Both come from WA OSPI, both use the same district / school codes, so a real-estate or education buyer can pull the full school-quality picture for one district - headcounts and demographics, then the graduate results behind them.

Built for real-estate developers and brokers sizing an area, education startups building a Washington district/school list, municipal and policy researchers, and parents comparing high schools - anyone who wants a district's graduate results, not just its headcount.

The core tool: a district's (or school's) graduate outcomes

Give a district or school, get its outcome rows across the metric you choose:

input { "districtCode": "31002", "metric": "earnings" }      // Everett
  Cascade High School   Bachelor's or Higher  4 yrs out   $43,300 median
  Cascade High School   Associate/Certificate 4 yrs out   $37,800 median  (202 grads)
  ...
input { "schoolName": "Ballard High School", "metric": "completion" }
  Ballard High School   cohort 2018  Bachelor's or Higher  6 yrs out   0.53  (53% earned a degree)
input { "schoolName": "Ballard High School", "metric": "remedial" }   // catch-up rates
  Ballard High School   cohort 2024  2-Year/CTC  both subjects   0.25  (25%)

One run = a whole cohort's outcomes, by year after graduation, by highest achievement (earnings) or degree type (completion) or subject (remedial).

What each record has

Field	Meaning
metric	earnings / completion / remedial (which table)
organizationLevel	School Dist (school-granular) / County / Statewide /
districtCode / districtName	WA school district (same code as the enrollment actor)
schoolCode / schoolName	The high school (school-granular rows)
target	Earnings: highest achievement (HS Diploma / Associate-Cert / Bachelor's+); Completion: degree type
metric	In each output row this is the observation point, not the table name: Earnings = years after graduation (1``15); Completion / Remedial = the graduating cohort year. The metric input selects the table
medianEarnings / medianHours	Earnings: median wage + hours worked in the metric year
pct	Completion / remedial: the rate, as a decimal (0.34 = 34%)
pctGroup	Completion / remedial: suppression bucket (0-2, for very small cohorts)
cohort / cohorttype	Completion: graduating year + 1yr/3yr observation window
level / subject	Remedial: enrollment level (2-year/4-year) + subject (English / Math / Both)
numRecords	Earnings: number of graduates behind the median

Typical questions it answers

• Do this district's graduates earn well? - districtCode + metric=earnings (median by years-out and achievement).
• Does a high school send kids to college who finish? - schoolName + metric=completion.
• How much remediation do a school's college-bound need? - metric=remedial.
• Which district's schools score best on outcomes? - aggregate=true + groupBy=school for an overview.
• Compare a district to its county - districtCode vs county rollup.

Inputs (all optional)

Input	What it does
districtCode / districtName	Target a school district (its high schools' rows)
schoolName	Target one high school (substring)
county	County-wide rollup layer
metric	earnings (default) / completion / remedial
highestAchievement	Earnings: HS Diploma / Associate-Cert / Bachelor's+
demotype	Student group (All Students default / Gender / Race / FRPL / GPA)
aggregate / groupBy	One row per school (or district) instead of outcome rows
maxResults	Cap records pushed (default 200)

Empty input returns a safe snapshot: the districts present in the earnings table, largest first (also the daily-quality-test default).

Low cost

From $0.001 per record - with a per-run charge cap so a mistake can't run up a big bill.

OSPI pre-aggregates outcomes into pivot tables that hide fake "schools" - synthetic rows whose codes read 9999 ("District Wide") or a literal NULL ("Statewide Comparison") sit alongside real high schools and would be billed and ranked as schools by a naive pull. We strip those merge-rows out of both raw results and roll-ups, and read the suppression buckets (redactedPct = the state hides small cohorts behind a 0-2 text band) for what they are. You query one outcomes surface across all three large tables (229k earnings / 2.5M completion / 623k remedial rows); the synthetic-school stripping and suppression buckets stay on our side.

Data source & freshness

• Source: data.wa.gov - WA OSPI Graduate Outcomes (39uh-rsgs Earnings, udag-wz3k Post-Secondary Completion, y8qh-965v Remedial Coursetaking; Socrata SODA API, free public, no login). Pre-aggregated - no individual student records.
• Coverage: 229,206 earnings rows across ~542 WA high schools + county/statewide rollups; completion cohorts 2005-2022; remedial through the 2024 cohort.
• Update cadence: OSPI refreshes annually as each new graduating cohort's outcomes are reported.