Working Paper: NBER ID: w18343
Authors: Stephanie Riegg Cellini; Latika Chaudhary
Abstract: A lengthy literature estimating the returns to education has largely ignored the for-profit sector. In this paper, we estimate the earnings gains to for-profit college attendance using restricted-access data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). Using an individual fixed effects estimation strategy that allows us to control for time-invariant unobservable characteristics of students, we find that students who enroll in associate's degree programs in for-profit colleges experience earnings gains of about 10 percent relative to high school graduates with no college degree, conditional on employment. Since associate's degree students attend for an average of 2.6 years, this translates to a 4 percent return per year of education in a for-profit college, slightly lower than estimates of returns for other sectors found in the literature.
Keywords: for-profit colleges; labor market returns; education; earnings
JEL Codes: I21; I23
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| For-Profit College Attendance (I23) | Earnings Gains (J31) |
| For-Profit College Attendance (I23) | Earnings Gains of 4% per year of education (I26) |
| Completing Associates Degree (Y80) | Earnings 20% more than dropouts (I21) |
| For-Profit College Attendance (I23) | Earnings Gains relative to high school graduates (J31) |