The Labor Market Returns to a For-Profit College Education

Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Latika Chaudhary

No 18343, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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.

JEL-codes: I2 I20 I21 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-lma
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Published as Cellini, Stephanie Riegg and Latika Chaudhary, “The Labor Market Returns to a For-Profit College Education.” Economics of Education Review, December 2014, 43: 125-140.

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Journal Article: The labor market returns to a for-profit college education (2014)
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