< Back to EDge Web Site News Main

March 3, 2006 EDge switches to using CIP codes for fields of study If you have been recently updating your school profile, in particular your school’s program listings, you may have noticed that we have made a change to our fields of study. Previously we had been using fields of study created by us internally. We have now switched over to using CIP (Classification of Instructional Programs) 2000 (Canada) codes and titles. CIP has the advantage of being an international standard of classifying programs and being a much richer list of classifications than our own fields of study were. CIP is used by such organizations as Statistics Canada and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the United States (its creators). Over the next few months, we will be going through our database of programs, careers, and scholarships to ensure that they are properly tagged with the appropriate CIP title. Our preliminary testing shows that the majority of the time, this will already be done as a result of our mapping process. In some cases, such as programs that concentrate on engineering or nursing, some minor tweaking may be needed as the CIP titles offer a greater variety of options than our fields of study did. For example, our previous system had an option for “Nursing”, while the CIP system has “Nurse/Registered Nurse”, “Pediatric Nurse/Nursing”, “Psychiatric/Mental Health Nurse/Nursing” and several other options. However, most of the work has already been done and we do not require any work from you. We just wanted to let you know the change had taken place. Please feel free to review your programs in our database. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. If you’d like to read a bit more about CIP, you can do so here: http://www.statcan.ca/english/concepts/definitions/education09.htm