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For-profit college dropouts take wage hit
A new study indicates that students who drop out of for-profit colleges fare worse in terms of pay than those who quit community colleges.
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Jeff Horwich: Congress and the media, including Marketplace, have heaped plenty of skepticism on for-profit colleges: low graduation rates, shady recruiting practices. But some new research shows going to a for-profit college -- as with the non-profit variety -- can pay off in the job market. From the Marketplace Education Desk at WYPR in Baltimore, here's Amy Scott.
Amy Scott: A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research says an associate’s degree from a for-profit college can add roughly 22 percent more to a person’s paycheck. Co-author Stephanie Riegg Cellini at George Washington University says graduates of community colleges see a similar increase in pay, but for-profit colleges typically cost a lot more.
Stephanie Riegg Cellini: This is purely an earnings bump. Does it cover what you paid for it? That’s not clear.
Cellini found that students who dropped out of for-profit schools fared worse than those who didn’t finish community college. Jeff Strohl is with Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.
Jeff Strohl: You could imagine that, when they drop out without a degree, they are close to a low-earning high school graduate.
He says for-profit colleges tend to recruit disadvantaged students who may be less prepared.
I’m Amy Scott for Marketplace.
"A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research says an associate’s degree from a for-profit college can add roughly 22 percent more to a person’s paycheck."
It says the data they used is from 1997. How is that relevant to now where the for-profit colleges have made educations cost upwards of $100,000?
These scamsters have NO value in the real world. They're creating programs based on IMPULSE to lure in vulnerable audiences to get the Federal money.
Actually, the NLSY97 is longitudinal data on individuals beginning in 1997 (when they were ages 14-18) through the present. All of the individuals from the data with degrees from for-profit colleges have graduated within the past 12 years. The longer ago they graduated, the more post-degree income data is available. Those who have graduated more recently have likely paid more for their degrees, but this is explicitly not a part of the analysis in this paper.
