The labor market returns to a for-profit college education

Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Latika Chaudhary

Economics of Education Review, 2014, vol. 43, issue C, 125-140

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% 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% return per year of education in a for-profit college, slightly lower than estimates of returns for other sectors found in the literature.

Keywords: Returns to education; For-profit colleges; NLSY; Earnings (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 I20 I23 J01 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

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Related works:
Working Paper: The Labor Market Returns to a For-Profit College Education (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:43:y:2014:i:c:p:125-140

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2014.10.001

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