Author: Oleksandr Movchan
In 2014, LEAD launched the NC Tool for Online Workforce and Education Reporting (NC TOWER), a product of the North Carolina Common Follow-up System. NC TOWER provides information on employment and wage outcomes and higher education enrollment for more than 1.2 million students who graduated from schools in the North Carolina Community College System and the University of North Carolina System over nearly two decades.
Since the introduction of NC TOWER, thousands of students, parents, educators, policy makers, and researchers have visited the site to explore post-graduation outcomes across different campuses, academic programs, and degree levels. From providing insights about the top paying degree programs to informing numerous data-driven decisions, NC TOWER has far-reaching applications.
Today, we are excited to unveil a fresh, modern NC TOWER that has been reengineered to integrate useful demographic data, a custom report builder, as well as enhanced functionality and visualizations to explore the same great content with new experience.
Information in NC TOWER can be viewed at an aggregate level - such as outcomes for all bachelor’s degree earners in North Carolina, regardless of where they went to school or what they studied. It can also be broken out by degree or credential type (Bachelor’s, Master’s, Associate, Certificate, etc.), subject areas (Curriculum Program or CIP codes), and individual public institutions. Employment and wage information can also be categorized by the industry sector of the student's employment.
NC TOWER was developed in partnership with the North Carolina Community College System and the University of North Carolina System, and it is based on the information from the Common Follow-up System (CFS), a longitudinal repository of workforce and education data that contains information on participants in North Carolina public employment, training, and education programs going back to the 1990's. The system also includes employment and wage information for more than 10 million unique individuals working in UI-covered employment in North Carolina over the last 25 years, making it one of the largest and longest operating State Longitudinal Data Systems in the nation.
To take a tour of the new NC TOWER, check out the video and feel free to connect with us via LEAD@commerce.nc.gov to learn more exciting updates about NC TOWER and CFS.