The federal trade school data is reported at the chain.
The government shows it to you as the campus.

A high school senior in Indianapolis is deciding whether to enroll in the electrician program at her local Lincoln Tech campus. She does the right thing. She opens the College Scorecard — the U.S. Department of Education's official outcomes-comparison tool — and looks up Lincoln College of Technology–Indianapolis. The federal data shows her that one year after completing the program, the median graduate earns $33,344.

She closes the tab feeling like she has a number to work with.

She doesn't. The same federal data shows $33,344 — to the dollar — for Lincoln Technical Institute–Union, NJ (a forty-minute drive from midtown Manhattan). And for Lincoln Technical Institute–Mahwah, NJ. And for Lincoln Technical Institute–Whitestone, Queens. Four campuses, three states, one identical number.

It happens to be a number that doesn't survive a basic plausibility check. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) most recent release shows the median electrician wage in the New York–Newark–Jersey City metro is roughly $14,000 a year higher than in the Indianapolis metro. The federal trade school data records none of that variance. It records $33,344 across every metro this chain operates in.

That isn't a Lincoln Tech problem. It is a federal data architecture problem. And after auditing the entire for-profit trade school sector in the College Scorecard field-of-study (FOS) dataset, we can say it isn't unique to Lincoln Tech either. It is the rule.

We pulled every for-profit institution in the federal data offering trade programs (CIP codes 46, 47, 48: construction trades; mechanic and repair technologies; precision production). We joined each campus to its parent OPEID6 — the federal identifier that groups branch campuses under a single institutional umbrella. We grouped campuses by parent. For each chain operating two or more campuses, we compared the College Scorecard FOS earnings figure for each program shared across branches.

Forty-nine chains qualify. Forty-one of them — every chain we could compare — report the same earnings figure for every branch on every program they share. Zero chains report distinct outcomes across branches. Not one. The remaining eight chains have too few non-suppressed records to compare.

The 41 fully-collapsed chains cover 160 branch campuses. A student looking up any of those campuses on the federal Scorecard is being shown a chain-level aggregate dressed up as a measurement of her specific location.

Lincoln Tech operates two distinct OPEID6 clusters in the federal data. One — anchored at the Indianapolis institution — runs eight branches across CO, IN, NJ, NY, TN, and TX. The other — anchored at New Britain, CT — runs seven branches across CT, IL, MD, and PA.

For the electrician program (CIP 4603, Cert <1yr), the Indianapolis-anchored cluster shows the following:

UEI College is the largest fully-collapsed chain in the audit by branch count. Eleven campuses across Arizona, California, and Georgia. For the HVAC program (CIP 4702, Cert <1yr), all eleven report identical earnings of $30,225 one year after completion.

A sample of the eleven:

San Joaquin Valley College's nine branches all sit within California. For the electrician program, eight of the nine campuses with non-suppressed data report identical earnings of $34,243 one year after completion.

Within California, BLS OEWS shows the following median electrician wages:

In the same College Scorecard FOS dataset, the completion count for each program is reported per-campus. The Lincoln Tech electrician program in Union, NJ reports 457 graduates. The same program in Indianapolis reports 85. The federal infrastructure for distinguishing branches works. It runs daily. It is used.

This matters because the most common defense of the current aggregation pattern is that branch-level cohort calculations are technically difficult. The 2023 Financial Value Transparency and Gainful Employment final rule (88 FR 70004) discusses the location-mapping problem in detail and explains the Department's decision to operate accountability calculations at OPEID6 — citing coverage, sample-size, and location-mapping issues for the field-of-study cohorts.

That argument applies to the cohort math — the privacy-preserving small-sample suppression rules, the wage-record matching, the post-completion follow-up. It does not apply to the location infrastructure itself. The federal data already knows which campus a completion happened at. The data already supports the OPEID8 eight-digit branch identifier. The chains we audited already produce branch-distinct completion records.

The choice the Department made was not “we can't distinguish branches.” The choice was: “the cohorts we run to produce earnings and debt outcomes are constructed at the parent level, and we will attach the resulting numbers to each branch's UNITID record without distinguishing them.” That is a different kind of choice. It is presentational, not infrastructural.

The College Scorecard FieldOfStudyData Technical Documentation explains that for multi-branch institutions, debt and earnings calculations are performed at the parent OPEID6 level because not all institutions report at the branch level, and pooling cohorts across branches produces calculable values where a strict per-branch calculation would suppress for sample size. The documentation is honest about this; the methodology is not hidden. The aggregation is acknowledged for anyone who reads the technical appendix.

But the user-facing interface of the College Scorecard does not surface the aggregation. A user looking up “Lincoln College of Technology–Indianapolis” on the public site sees a row for the campus. The row shows earnings_1yr. There is no notice that the earnings_1yr value displayed for this campus is identical to the value displayed for the campus in Whitestone, Queens. There is no notice that the figure was computed across a parent-OPEID6 cohort and pinned to each branch's UNITID record. The interface presents a per-campus measurement. What the underlying data delivers is a per-chain measurement attached to a per-campus row.

That gap — between what the data actually measures and what the interface implies it measures — is the failure mode. It is also the easiest part of the system to fix. The math doesn't need to change. The labels do.

The 2025–2026 Department of Education accountability rulemaking is reopening the framework that determines which programs lose federal Title IV eligibility, which institutions face enforcement, and what data students are shown when comparing their options. The unit of measurement — institution, program, or branch — is one of the questions on the table.

The fix is specific. For institutions operating two or more branches that enroll above a sample-size threshold in a given (program, credential) pair, the federal cohort calculation should be performed at the branch level (OPEID8). Where branch-level cohorts fall below the suppression threshold, the record should be suppressed honestly — labeled as “insufficient data at this location” — rather than backfilled with a chain-wide number. Where multiple branches share genuinely indistinguishable cohorts, the federal interface should label the displayed number as a chain-level pooled value, not as the campus's own outcome.

That is a presentational and statistical adjustment. It does not require new data collection. It does not require new infrastructure. The OPEID8 identifier already exists. The branch-level completion infrastructure already runs. The only thing missing is the willingness to report what the federal data actually measures, at the unit it actually measures.

If this cycle's rulemaking does not require branch-level reporting, the question closes for a decade. Students enrolling in these chains between now and then will continue to read numbers that are not about their campuses. They will continue to be told, by the federal government's own outcomes-comparison tool, that their local Lincoln Tech produces identical results to a Lincoln Tech in another state — when there is no economic basis for believing that is true.