Graduation Requirements Disclosure

CIRR schools must clearly publish requirements for a certificate of completion and include them as part of their enrollment agreements with students. We recommend you do this as soon as practically possible, even before joining CIRR.

Enrollment Agreement Disclosure

We also suggest you include language in your enrollment agreement authorizing you to contact graduates' employers to provide employment verification documentation. You may also wish to include language letting students know to expect you to contact them and asking them to agree to respond to your post-graduation inquiries about job placement.

Truth in Advertising

Before joining CIRR, we recommend you discontinue advertising outcomes figures that do not comply with the CIRR standards, so as to avoid sudden changes in your advertised outcomes figures. CIRR members must follow the below standards; while you won't have outcomes to advertise until you issue your first report, we recommend that you understand them before joining so that you can begin phasing out any advertising that does not comply.

Records

For each advertisement or public communication that uses outcomes statistics, records must be kept that document which graduates were used to calculate the statistics in accordance with the CIRR standards.

Advertising In-Field Employment

For any advertisement or public communication (except those required by regulatory and licensure reporting) that makes a claim about the rate of “in-field” (or equivalent language) employment, the only graduates who may be counted as “in-field” (or equivalent) are those who have met the documentation criteria for Employed In-Field on the CIRR report.

After the release of school’s first cohort reported under CIRR standards, schools may not advertise or issue a public communication regarding in-field employment that includes graduates not covered by a cohort report publicly released under CIRR standards.

Advertising Salaries

The primary salary number in any advertisement must be median salary as computed under CIRR standards.

Any advertisement or public communication (except those required by regulatory and licensure reporting) about salaries must be accompanied by a “clear and conspicuous” disclosure of the percentage of all graduates who reported salaries (in the report from which the salary figure was taken). If the advertising format in a given ad is too small for the disclosure, then salary information may not be advertised.

Advertising Graduation Rates

For any advertisement or public communication (except those required by regulatory and licensure reporting) that makes a claim about the graduation rate, for programs with a published program length, the only number that may be used is the percentage of students who graduate within 100% of published program length (on-time); for self-paced programs, the only number that may be used is the percentage graduated during the reporting period as calculated and reported under CIRR standards.

Aggregation

For any advertisement or public communication (except those required by regulatory and licensure reporting) that aggregates results from multiple periods, the aggregation may not span more than a 12 month period and the advertisement must state in a clear and conspicuous manner the time periods that have been aggregated.

A school with multiple campuses or programs may aggregate its data across all of its campuses and programs to produce a school-wide statistic. In all aggregations, all campuses or programs must be included in the results being advertised and the statistic must be calculated as the average weighted by the number of students.

In any advertisements for a specific campus or program, only that campus's or programs outcomes may be used.

For any advertisements that include aggregated results, a disclaimer must be included stating “Above results are the average outcomes aggregated across multiple [campuses/programs]. For results of a specific [campus/program] visit CIRR.org."