Employers are demanding higher skilled and better educated workers. Yet employer sentiment and the high default rate on student loans suggests a mismatch between the programs students are completing and the work they are able to find. To report on trends in postsecondary education, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) mostly relies on surveys of postsecondary institutions for its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). The information does not include employment and earnings outcomes. ED also oversees the production of the College Scorecard, which incorporates annual earnings data gathered from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, but these data are limited to federally aided students, and ED does not report the results for individual programs of study or majors, only for institutions as a whole. Many states have longitudinal data systems that connect postsecondary data with state quarterly Unemployment Insurance (UI) wage data for research and accountability. However, state UI wage records do not include military personnel, those who go out of state to work, work for the federal government, or are self-employed. Moreover, the majority of states lack any quality consumer reports that show median wages of postsecondary degrees by program. If the federal government had a student-level data network (SLDN), then it could account for the outcomes of almost all postsecondary students. An SLDN would allow ED's statistical agency, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), to securely match several essential data points on postsecondary students to produce aggregated information on postsecondary and workforce outcomes, as well as information disaggregated for key demographic groups. Education is the most important investment both for a person's future, and the nation's economy. Americans need the information to make the decisions that they see as right for themselves, and an SLDN would go a long way in helping them to make those decisions.