Our Mission
Course Map was built to solve a simple problem: choosing the right university course is one of the biggest financial decisions you'll ever make, but it's almost impossible to compare courses objectively.
We bring together data from HESA, the Graduate Outcomes survey, the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset (linked to HMRC tax records), the National Student Survey, and UCAS to give you the full picture on every course at every UK university.
No marketing spin. No league table politics. Just the real data on what graduates earn, where they work, and whether students were satisfied.
Real Salary Data
Graduate salaries linked directly to HMRC tax records — not self-reported surveys.
Career Outcomes
See the exact job titles graduates end up in — not vague “employability” percentages.
Side-by-Side Compare
Put up to 4 courses head-to-head across 15+ metrics with automatic best-in-class highlighting.
Course Score
Our proprietary A+ to E grading system weighs earnings, satisfaction, and career outcomes.
Our Data Sources
Graduate Outcomes (GO)
Survey of graduates 15 months after completing their course. Covers salary, employment type, and job satisfaction.
LEO (Longitudinal Education Outcomes)
Salary data 3 and 5 years after graduation, linked to HMRC tax records for accuracy.
National Student Survey (NSS)
Annual survey of final-year students covering teaching quality, assessment, academic support, and overall satisfaction.
UCAS & HESA
Course details, entry requirements, qualification types, and institutional data across every UK university.
Methodology
Course Score
Each course receives a score out of 100 based on a weighted formula: graduate salary (40%), student satisfaction (25%), continuation rate (15%), professional employment rate (10%), and meaningful work rate (10%). The letter grade (A+ to E) maps to score bands.
Salary Percentiles
Salary data shows the median (50th percentile), lower quartile (25th percentile), and upper quartile (75th percentile). This gives a realistic range rather than a misleading single number. Data is sourced from Graduate Outcomes (15 months) and LEO (3 and 5 years).
Student Satisfaction
Satisfaction scores are averaged from 8 NSS questions covering teaching quality, learning opportunities, assessment, academic support, organisation, learning resources, learning community, and student voice. Each metric is a percentage of students who responded positively.
Data Suppression
When a course has fewer than 52.5 respondents or a low response rate, the data is suppressed by HESA to protect individual privacy. In these cases, we show an em-dash (—) rather than N/A to indicate the data exists but cannot be published.