Every year, institutions receiving federal student financial aid (Title IV institutions) are required to report degree completions data to IPEDS under the 6 digit CIP Code for each field of study (if award level is bachelor's degree: major). The CIP taxonomy is organized on three levels: 1) the two-digit series (representing the most general groupings of related programs); 2) the four-digit series (representing intermediate groupings of programs that have comparable content); and 3) The six-digit series (also called six-digit CIP Codes, representing specific instructional programs). In Summer 2019, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) announced the release of the 2020 CIP. The 2020 edition of the CIP (CIP-2020) is the 6th version of the CIP and presents an updated taxonomy of instructional program classifications. IPEDS institutions were asked to use the 2020 CIP beginning with the Fall 2020 Completions Survey (gathering data on the number of degrees awarded between July 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020). (For the Fall 2019 Completions Survey, institutions used CIP 2010, or the 5th version.)
The CIP-2020 contains over 300 new six-digit codes. They represent the new/emerging instructional programs (e.g., Data Science, Data Analytics, Institutional Research, Climate Science, Cloud Computing) that exist at institutions but were not included in the 2010 CIP.